Rebecca West · 1941 · overland

Rebecca West's account of six weeks in Yugoslavia in 1937, written as the war closed in and running to eleven hundred pages. She travelled with her husband from Croatia to Montenegro, and turned a journey into a reckoning with Balkan history, the assassination at Sarajevo, and the European appetite for sacrifice that she believed was about to consume everyone.

1. 1
   Zagreb

   The journey begins in Croatia, where West is met by three Croat writers who disagree about everything - and the method establishes itself: every conversation opening into six hundred years of argument.

2. 2
   Split

   Down the Dalmatian coast to Diocletian's palace at Split, and on through Trogir and Korcula to a Dubrovnik she finds oddly disagreeable - admiring the Dalmatians chiefly for having held the Turks off the coast for centuries.

3. 3
   Mostar

   Into Herzegovina, where she is appalled by what four centuries of Ottoman rule left behind - and at Trebinje and Mostar meets Muslim Slavs whose ancestors were Christians, which sets her thinking about conquest.

4. 4
   Sarajevo

   At Sarajevo she walks the corner where Princip shot Franz Ferdinand and reconstructs the day in detail - a sequence of accidents, wrong turnings and a reversing car, on which the whole twentieth century turns.

5. 5
   Belgrade

   In Serbia she finds government officials living opulently among a shabby professional class, and works back through the Turkish conquest of 1389, the expulsion of 1912 and the murder of King Alexander in 1934.

6. 6
   Ohrid

   Macedonia she loves without reservation - the Byzantine churches, the frescoes at Nerezi, the lake at Ohrid and Sveti Naum - and it is here that she watches the gypsy rite that gives the book half its title.

7. 7
   Kosovo Polje

   On the field of Kosovo, where the Serbs lost to the Turks in 1389, she confronts the poem of the grey falcon - in which a prince is offered earthly victory or a heavenly kingdom, and chooses to die.

8. 8
   Cetinje

   The journey ends in Montenegro, and the epilogue is written in London under bombing - West arguing that the Balkans were not a backwater but the place where Europe's future had already been rehearsed.