The post-1989 temptation in Prague has been two-fold. The first has been to legislate the totalitarian past out of existence. The entire communist era has been declared illegal. At a time when the intellectual West is obsessed with memory, the problem here is at once how to forget, so society can move on, and not forget, so justice can be done. Nothing real and honest is easy, but I would need more Czech truly to share the agony.

The second temptation has been to copy the liberal West blindly at a lag of 20 years. Pensions are set to be privatised and the national health system dismantled. Haven't they noticed the difficulties we have had in Britain from putting economic efficiency ahead of public provision? The Crunch should at least put the brakes on overhasty reform.

When I toured the Soviet-oriented world in the early 1980s for my book In the Communist Mirror, I found myself longing for a world which combined the good things from both the liberal and the socialist models. I don't see the past as all bad, or rather, I think intellectuals ought to be able to separate the high-minded communitarian ideals that lay behind the dreadful reality of communist life and discuss them in a way that would please Plato and Aristotle, not always throw their hats into the ideological ring. Discussing the old idealism is a bit like discussing religion. You may disagree, but it's crude to throw the whole thing away unexamined.