Carrying the flame across the divide

In 1979, the Oxford philosophy sub-faculty received a battered letter from a Czech dissident academic inviting philosophers to come and lecture at his underground seminar in Prague. To their great credit, they responded.

Three Oxford visitors were each expelled by the Czech security police, attracting internat-ional headlines and redoubling the commitment of the visitors. This led to the foundation of the Jan Hus Educational Foundation in Oxford as the charitable hub of this work, subsequently extended to Polish, Hungarian and Romanian dissidents.

So began a deep intellectual - and inevitably political - relationship between a group of British, largely Oxford, academics, artists and writers including this reviewer, motivated by academic freedom and a revulsion of communist repression, and leading Czech and Slovak dissidents taking great risks to keep the flames of free thought and human rights alight.

It is this often-dramatic story, much of the early part reported in the pages of The THES , that forms the basis of this book. Jessica Douglas-Home writes with passion and fluidity, and the story moves at pace, as she takes the reader vividly through tense preparations for visits behind the Iron Curtain, the clandestine nature of the meetings, the long discussions of great ideas and those occasions when Jan Hus visitors were arrested and thrown out. There is also suffering on both sides, not least as the first half of the book is set against the backcloth of the battle against cancer of Douglas-Home's husband, Charlie, while editing The Times . All this serves to illustrate the great divide between the "taken-for-granted" openness of the West, and the absurd control mechanisms of the East. Across this divide, lives were deeply affected: visitors witnessed Soviet-style suffocation, while, by their own testimonies, dissidents were boosted to continue their struggles.

The book works well. It is a stirring memoir, and of course, as such, is inevitably partial, seen through Douglas-Home's notes and eyes, though well supplemented by drawing on contemporary news reports and the extensive reports that all Jan Hus visitors would write for the trust about their visits.

More than that, though, the story is told by someone convinced that it was those on the right of the political divide who had the real answers to communism; it was their ideas and their work that was most critical. There is therefore, alongside the dissidents, also a western hero, the rightwing philosopher Roger Scruton, a kind of Pimpernel of the East, and there is a winning formula: communism bad, capitalism good. It is certainly true that for a long time the old left had a blind spot about the Soviet-occupation of Central Europe, and also that the great thirst was for new ideas "free of the taint of communist double speak and discredited leftwing ideals". But the 1989 revolutions did not simply usher in a universal rush towards a Burkeian, monetarist idyll, while the strength of the trust was precisely that it involved those from across the entire political spectrum. Yet in this book, when right-leaning visitors are arrested, they are brave, while the left-leaning ones (including me) are blameworthy. Indeed, a number of significant left-leaning, even liberal, western visitors merit little mention.

This is in no way to denigrate the impact of this book. To paraphrase Scruton, as quoted in the book, (in fact speaking of a left-winger): the important thing is that Douglas-Home did things. So few did, and few can have known just quite how much, especially for Romania.

With the recent fall from power of Slobodan Milosevic, one of the last old-style, unelected, European dictators, it is good to be reminded of these individual acts of heroism, pieces in the complex jigsaw that led to 1989, a turning point of a revolution in our lifetime.

Paul Flather is secretary general of the Europaeum, an association of European universities.