Roger Scruton, Fiona Rintoul

Roger Scruton and Fiona Rintoul discuss life in Eastern Europe under communism. Scruton, who is Professor for the Institute for the Psychological Sciences in Washington and Oxford, engages in contemporary political and cultural debates as a conservative thinker.

From 1979 to 1989, he was an active supporter of dissidents in Eastern Europe under Communist Party rule, forging links between Czechoslovakia's dissident academics and their counterparts in Western universities.

He was detained in 1985 in Brno before being expelled from the country and placed on the Index of undesirable persons.

His latest book Notes from Underground describes a doomed love affair between two young people trapped by the system of the Czech communism.

Fiona Rintoul is a writer, journalist and translator. As a bolshie student in the mid-80s, she spent a term behind the Iron Curtain at a university in East Germany.

30 years later, her fascination with communist Eastern Europe led to her novel, The Leipzig Affair which won the 2013 Virginia prize for the best fiction and was serialised on BBC Radio 4.