When, to the surprise of western chancelleries, central Europe changed utterly in the autumn and winter of 1989, it was a stocky Czech dramatist lately released from prison who produced the abiding metaphor for what had happened. In 1947, after Yalta and Potsdam, said Václav Havel, who has died aged 75 after a long illness, the clock of history had been stopped in his half of Europe – and now it h
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