Lying can never save us from another lie

Vaclav Havel is dead. We shall not see his like again.

Timothy Garton Ash's The Magic Lantern: The Revolution of '89 Witnessed in Warsaw, Budapest, Berlin, and Prague  is a fine book that covers his role in the Czech Velvet Revolution written by someone who was there.

The Magic Lantern Theatre was Havel's HQ. A telling detail I remember was that a rubber stamp of a smiley cat served as the imprimatur of documents issued there. You can't help but love the man who would wield that.

Vince was at ETH in Zurich at the time and working with Prague University in the heady times when someone could be a dissident working as a cleaner one day, and Foreign Minister the next, but those are his stories and for another time.