Good relations
Sir: Timothy Garton Ash writes (‘I was the man from Spekta’, 7 November) that Britain had a good name in central Europe. Perhaps the British Council played some small part in that. Uniquely in communist countries, the Council in Poland worked independently of the embassy, and with the encouragement of many Polish academics and others and — for all the compromises that had to be made — helped to keep alight the flame of independent cultural relations which are intolerable to totalitarian government.

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