In his Afterthoughts column Ian Sansom cites the historian Herbert Butterfield: “in every Englishman there is hidden something of a Whig that seems to tug at the heart-strings”. After the fall of the Berlin Wall many presumed that the Whiggish sense of the inexorable march of progress would become the birthright of every European. With the Russian offensive grinding onwards to Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second city, that dream is dying. As Timothy Garton Ash reminds us in his TLS essay “Where is Central Europe Now?”, the recriminations began long before 1989. Milan Kundera’s seminal “The Tragedy of Central Europe”, published in 1984, demanded that Czechoslovakia, Poland and Hungary should be termed “Central” not “Eastern” Europe, the latter associated with the Soviet imperium. Russian writers, led by Joseph Brodsky, were furious at the imputation that they belonged in a barbaric, non-European East.
I seem to have lived with this story most of my life. After the Soviet invasion my family took in refugees from Czechoslovakia and Poland – Miroslav Holub and Vaclav Havel’s English translator, George Theiner, and the family of a cartoonist fleeing the military crackdown on Solidarity. A formative memory was meeting the Soviet dissident Vladimir Bukovsky. Locked up in a psychiatric prison for his “insane” views, Bukovsky retained a sense of humour – he told me of his ambition to live in a Scottish castle with its own ghost. Alexander Solzhenitsyn was a hero too. Years later, on a black pebble beach at Yalta in
