There are cities in the world that exercise a particular influence over the minds of writers, artists and historians because they seem to manifest a type of spirit, a genius loci, through which an intellectual vitalism is channelled or communicated. Cities galvanized, in their very substance, by a cultural electricity – a vortex – their names imbued with powers of conjuration – Paris, Berlin, New York, Prague. Such is the mystique of the mind’s geography, that thought and poetry find their location in a given place and time which nevertheless appear transcendent. Equally, there is a question of pragmatics: culture, wherever it is conspicuous, happens by implication and association, like a political crime. The end of “the Empire of Stalinist