At the IHR Parliaments, Politics and People seminar on Tuesday 16 June, Dr Juliette Bretan of Cambridge University will be discussing literary depictions of, and new proposals regarding, the politics of British involvement in East-central Europe during the interwar period.

The seminar takes place on 16 June 2026, between 5:30 and 6:30 p.m. It is fully ‘hybrid’, which means you can attend either in-person in London at the IHR, or online via Zoom. Details of how to join the discussion are available here.

Written by the English civil servant and author C. K. Munro, and published in 1922, The Rumour, a satirical play, begins with a pompous Englishman, Luke, giving the first description of the quarrelsome, fictitious East-central European nations of Przimia and Loria:

Luke (sitting up, with his two hands side by side in front of him, evidently much absorbed in what he is saying): Well, there you are: that’s the position. There you have the two countries side by side – the Przimians here, the Lorians there.

The Rumour describes national and international tensions following a dissatisfactory post-war territorial agreement; it was staged many times between the 1920s and 1930. The play is split into two parts showing the preamble to, and outbreak of, another war. This war is manipulated by British magnates, who, to ensure western international economic gain, concoct a rumour that Loria is planning to recover its lost land. 

The opening passage is ostensibly about elucidating fact, with Luke’s slick systematisation of the locations, and relations, of Przimia and Loria. But the process of definition dramatizes a particular way of seeing by Luke – a supercilious setting-out of the region in a particular formulation. It imbues Luke with an authority recalling that of informed wartime and post-war experts on East-central Europe, who, according to Eugene Michail, ‘operat[ed] in between academia and politics […] from behind the smokescreen of objectivity, they could pursue their own political agendas’. Luke’s involvement in industry deepens this.

And it is the very opposite of descriptions of Munro’s own exploratory geopolitical discussions, which took place over lunch at the R.S.G. Club, a private lunch club, where he ‘used to open up with some provocatively naïve question which set everyone arguing’. The point here is that Munro was critiquing English self-interest and paternalism in the case of East-central Europe, instead preferring an openness to the region, and showing the limitations of international treaties and diplomacy, after the First World War.

The play is an example of an overlooked yet crucial trend in English literature of the interwar period: the fascination of writers with the twentieth-century reconfiguration of East-central Europe. Writers ranging from canonical modernists, like T. S. Eliot, to key figures of the twentieth century like Evelyn Waugh, and to lesser-known writers, like Munro, embraced the region as a topic of their works, in different ways.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, the rise of German militarism, the birth of geopolitics – especially localised to East-central Europe – and the breakout of the First World War (in the Balkans), involved Britain in European, and especially East-central European politics for the first time in years. English authors had to reconfigure their understandings of the region. This was especially the case through the combined influences of anti-German imperialism and pro-East-central European nationalism, the support of Russia, the rise of intellectual expertise on the region – and the role of intellectuals in shaping political actions – and new ideas of national sovereignty and self-determination. By the end of the war, geopolitical changes in East-central Europe inspired a new set of interests in questions of nationalism.

If, for Munro, the post-war world led to criticisms of self-interest, for T. S. Eliot, there were aspirations to reset the clock. His works, especially his modernist masterpiece, The Waste Land, published the same year as The Rumour, focused on depictions of East-central Europe as a place of ongoing conflict, and poverty, and called for a return to the empires of old. In his drafts, he portrayed the ‘Polish plains’ (his final version of the poem has them as ‘endless plains’) as a region of ‘hooded hordes swarming’ and of a ‘murmur of maternal lamentation’, of ‘empty cisterns and exhausted wells’, and as a ‘decayed hole’. He suggested East-central Europe was not a place where nationalism worked – and claimed he preferred the European empires, with their lands and traditional literatures. This is a more xenophobic image of the transnational and European Eliot which is often forgotten in Eliot scholarship.

Evelyn Waugh, meanwhile, promoted East-central Europe in his works, especially in terms of critiquing western disinterest in the region post-war. He was motivated by religious interest, including an allegiance with a traditional, Christian Poland, which continued into the Second World War.

With a new war in East-central Europe now, it is more important than ever to consider how early twentieth century authors worked to describe, but also change, the political decisions behind the reconfiguration of the region. These authors raise questions about British relations to Europe, xenophobia, attitudes towards imperialism and nationalism, and the importance of culture in geopolitics, which are still relevant today.

The seminar takes place on 16 June 2026, between 5:30 and 6:30 p.m. It is fully ‘hybrid’, which means you can attend either in-person in London at the IHR, or online via Zoom. Details of how to join the discussion are available here.