In 1986, my quiet life as a doctoral student in philosophy was punctuated by a trip to Brno in Czechoslovakia (as it then was), where I found myself in a high-speed, chicken-scattering taxi, chasing a bus before it reached the border. It was my small part in a larger story of philosophers’ derring-do during the Cold War. The Oxford philosopher of science Bill Newton-Smith had been arrested prior to my trip in the middle of a talk in Prague, taken to secret police headquarters for interrogation, ...