In 1979, when teaching philosophy at the University of London, I responded to an invitation to address a private seminar in Prague. Some stoked boilers in hospitals; others in apartment blocks; one stoked at a railway station, another in a school. Roger receiving the Czech Medal of Merit from President Václav HavelThis was my first encounter with ‘dissidents’, and I felt an immediate affinity. But the fuss these seminars created enabled us to establish genuinely secret courses in Prague, Brno and Bratislava. I became a Czech patriot at the very moment when I had become an official enemy of the Czechoslovak state.

Source: Daily Mail June 29, 2019 23:28 UTC