On March 27,1938, just two days before signing the Munich agreement, by which Czechoslovakia was dismembered, Neville Chamberlain referred to the Czech-German dispute in the Sudetenland as “a quarrel in a far-away country between people of whom we know nothing.” The insularity and outright ignorance displayed in this remark, while surprising in a national leader, were not untypical of the views prevailing before World War II among the English-speaking public regarding not only the Sudeten problem, but much else in Eastern Europe. The accounts of journalists, travelers, and writers in search of sensation did little to counteract, and frequently merely reflected, the shallow and often disdainful opinions held by many Westerners regarding the quarrelsome nationalities of Eastern Europe.