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The Underground University
During the Cold War, Oxford philosophers worked together to aid dissidents behind the Iron Curtain. I was one of them
The Oxford philosopher of science Bill Newton-Smith had been arrested prior to my trip in the middle of a talk in Prague, taken to secret police headquarters for interrogation, then driven in a convoy through the snowy night to the West German frontier and expelled. Tom Stoppard portrayed the atmosphere brilliantly in his play Professional Foul, written and broadcast in the late 1970s, in the shadow of the harassment and imprisonment of another playwright (Václav Havel) by the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic. I remember hearing stories of Wilkes, who walked with difficultly after a long-ago accident, careening around various Slavic cities, leading the secret police on winding routes to cafés, where she would then settle in for hours on end, with some rough wine as company.
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