Outside the Czech Republic, Karel Čapek is mainly remembered now for introducing the word “robot” to the world. It occurs in his satirical play of 1920, R.U.R. (the initials stand for Rossum’s Universal Robots; “rozum” means intelligence and “robota” means work in Czech), in which mass-manufactured androids gain the power to destroy the human race. However, the drama is a love story as much as a dystopia, displaying Čapek’s ambivalence towards new technology. At the end of the last act, there is the prospect of a hybrid race that will arise from a robot “Adam” and a human “Eve.”

Born in 1890, Čapek flourished in the independent Czechoslovakia that emerged after the First World War, which saw a period of confident modernism in all the arts. His play The Makropulos Case, which concerns the dilemma of a woman who possesses an elixir of life but, by the age of 337, has grown tired of living, was turned into a memorable opera by Leoš Janáček. Čapek also wrote half a dozen novels, including War with the Newts, ostensibly science fiction, but more effectively a satire on dictatorships. The playwright Arthur Miller wrote admiringly of his “prophetic assurance” combined with a “new surrealistic humor” and great personal warmth. “Utopians don’t usually like people too much, but Čapek’s spirit is ample and welcoming and not at all self-important as he outlines the probable end of the known world.”

Like so much Czech literature, Čapek’s writing often revolves around the challenges and costs of remaining human in the face of ideological tyranny, for which an ironizing sense of humour is such an essential tool. AI, ageing, authoritarianism: with subjects like these, there are reasons enough to read him today. “His protagonists are people looking for answers,” writes Peter Kussi, the editor of a centenary anthology of Čapek’s work: “detectives and scientists, explorers and clairvoyants — as well as perplexed ‘ordinary’ people.” To this list we could add “travellers,” as he also wrote a curious series of letters from various European countries, amused and perplexed by the ways of their people.

An anglophile and friend of Bernard Shaw and G. K. Chesterton, Čapek made a comprehensive tour of Britain in the summer of 1924. The result was Letters from England, which he illustrated with his own humorous sketches. They are jaunty accounts, full of entertaining encounters and quirky sights, and they contrast with his private letters home at the same time, which are full of his self-doubt as a writer.

He is apprehensive as his ferry approaches the English shore, seeing that the White Cliffs of Dover are “built quite solidly enough, one might almost say on rock,” but feeling nevertheless that the Continent offers the firmer footing. During the course of the summer, he explores London from the deer of Richmond Park to the Jewish slums of the East End before striking out to bucolic Surrey and Sussex, to Oxford and Cambridge, Dartmoor, the Lake District. He also tours Scotland and Wales (Letters from England is a misnomer). But despite putting “the Irish question” to almost everyone he meets, he does not travel on there (this is a year after the civil war that followed the founding of the Irish Free State).

A passage entitled “The English Park” sets the typical tone: “The trees are perhaps the most beautiful things in England. The meadows too of course and the policemen . . .” The two-metre policemen are “recruited according to their beauty and size . . . they are like gods.” Meanwhile, the trees perhaps “have a large influence on Toryism in England.” In a city street, he considers, he would be a “rabid Radical,” but under an ancient oak he is “seriously tempted to acknowledge the value of old things.”

He declares England “the most fabulous and romantic” of all the countries he has seen. An Englishman strolling across the grass suddenly “opens up the marvelous possibility of walking elsewhere than along a road, without regarding oneself as a beast of prey, a highwayman, or an anarchist.”

The reek of London street differs from that of Paris, lacking “cosmetic powder, coffee and cheese,” and “the people are quieter here than elsewhere: they speak to each other out of the side of their mouths and look to see if they are home yet.” He finds greater loquacity at Speakers’ Corner, of which Čapek’s description could remind one of another Czechoslovakian, the illustrator Miroslav Šašek and his wonderful This is London.

Art is found in galleries, not in the streets; perhaps because of Protestantism, he concludes. He misreads the gallery guide at Madame Tussaud’s and learns that the mass-murderers’ waxes he has been looking at are in fact Bernard Shaw, Blériot and Marconi. At the British Empire Exhibition, he notices, amid an abundance of their wares, the near total absence of people of colour.

He speculates that the English must have devised games because of their reluctance to converse. English cooking may be “good,” in which case it is French, or “middling,” which “explains the English gloominess.” In the country, land left to pasture would shock his peasant farmer uncle; here, food is imported. “The English countryside isn’t for working it; it is for looking at.”

The one thing he really hates is the British Sunday — “A day when no-one cooks, travels, looks or thinks.” “The Exeter Sunday is so thorough and sacred that even the churches are closed.” And “The Scottish Sunday is even worse than the English one.”

In the end, he longs for Prague and the Continent, which is “noisier, less disciplined, dirtier, more rabid, craftier, more passionate, more convivial, more amorous, hedonistic, vivacious, coarse, garrulous, unruly and somehow less perfect.” Čapek’s perspective is that of a patriotic citizen of the new Czechoslovak republic. All the time on his travels, he is weighing the qualities of what he sees for potential transplantation to his homeland. This is surely why he is so acute on Britain’s freedoms (walking on the grass) and constraints (those policemen) as well as its odd self-repression.

Čapek was heartbroken at the betrayal of his country by the British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain in September 1938 at Munich, which left the Nazis free to extinguish the flame of Czechoslovakian liberty. He died of pneumonia on Christmas Day that year.