This autumn has provided a couple of opportunities for people to come together. In the Czech Republic, under the auspices of the former Prime Minister Petr Fiala, who was part of the Underground University, the Moravian Museum launched an exhibition Sparks of Freedom ~ British Support of Brno Dissent Groups in the 1980s.
 

It followed two years of hard work by the curator Petra Pichlová, her deputy Romana Dominika Hrbátová, and the museum staff. The report by Barbara Day can be read here. Sam and Lucy travelled to Brno, along with Robert Grant, for the occasion. The Prague Radio website has a full report, photos and interview with Barbara Day and Nancy Durham which can be enjoyed here.

 
The exhibition runs until 19 April 2026 and might appeal to anyone wanting to know more about the work to support intellectual freedom in Central Europe. There is also a concert by David Matthews next April which we hope to go to and, which other readers may enjoy and take the opportunity to visit Brno: 12th April 2026 – Jac van Steen will conduct the Brno Philharmonic Orchestra in a performance of David's New Fire at Beseda House, Brno, Czech Republic, as part of the Easter Festival of Sacred Music.
 
The idea of the ‘sacred’ is perhaps the theme of this newsletter as it was also introduced during the course of the Symposium in London hosted at the Hungarian Embassy and organised by the team who run the Scruton Hub Cafés in Budapest. A full report of the Roger Scruton Symposium can be read here. Panellist, Professor Douglas Hedley, referred to the work of his PhD student, who identifies Roger Scruton’s interest in the sacred as coming out of his work in Central Europe. A follow up e-mail with the student offers more insight: ‘Yes, it is quite clear in Scruton's work that the impetus for his finding the 'sacred' to be a pertinent area of concern was the enforced atheism, in every sense, of Soviet Eastern Europe. This is the reason, I think, why his important work Sexual Desire: A Moral Philosophy of the Erotic (1986) culminates in a chapter on civil society and the necessary corporate personality of (its) institutions: namely, precisely that which the USSR destroyed upon its arrival in the Eastern Bloc.’
 
The idea of civic institutions and their value and the danger in destroying them also came up in a discussion on Radio 4 where Lord Gove was being interviewed and the interviewer brought up Roger’s maxim that good things are more easily destroyed than created.