degree in theology (the only faculty that responded to the request for help). There were structured courses and samizdat translations, books were printed, and people sat exams in a cellar with papers smuggled out through the diplomatic bag. Scruton was detained in 1985 in Brno before being expelled from the country. The Czech dissident Bronislava Müllerová watched him walk across the border with Austria: "There was this broad empty space between the two border posts, absolutely empty, not a single human being in sight except for one soldier, and across that broad empty space trudged an English philosopher, Roger Scruton, with his little bag into Austria." On 17 June that year, he was placed on the Index of Undesirable Persons. He wrote that he had also been followed during visits to Poland and Hungary. For his work in supporting dissidents, Scruton was awarded the First of June Prize in 1993 by the Czech city of Plzeň, and in 1998 he was awarded the Czech Republic's Medal of Merit (First Class) by President Václav Havel. In 2019 the Polish government awarded him the Grand Cross of the Order of Merit of the Republic of Poland. Scruton was strongly critical of figures in the West — in particular Eric Hobsbawm — who "chose to exonerate" the crimes and atrocities of former communist regimes. His experience of dissident intellectual life in 1980s Communist Prague is recorded in fictional form in his novel Notes from Underground (2014). He wrote in 2019 that "despite the appeal of the Poles, Hungarians, Romanians and many more, it is the shy, cynical Czechs to whom I lost my heart and from whom I have never retrieved it". 1990s–2000s Farm purchase, second marriage Scruton took a year's sabbatical from Birkbeck in 1990 and spent it working in Brno in the Czech Republic. That year he registered Central European Consulting, established to offer business advice in post-communist Central Europe. He sold his apartment in Notting Hill Gate, and when he returned to England, he rented a cottage in Stanton Fitzwarren, Swindon, from the Moonies, and an apartment in the Albany building on Piccadilly, London, from the Conservative MP Alan Clark (it had been Clark's servants' quarters). From 1992 to 1995, he lived in Boston, Massachusetts, teaching an elementary philosophy course and a graduate course on the philosophy of music for one semester a year, as professor of philosophy at Boston