In the clear frosty pre-dawn of 17 November I was watching the Leonid meteor shower. Not far away a tawny owl was calling. Pieces of comet debris blazing trails through the earth's atmosphere, and a hunter able to catch mice in near darkness--wonders of physics and biology.

Groucho Marx once quipped, 'I don't want to belong to any club that will accept me as a member'.

Philip Boobbyer, a lecturer in modern European history at the University of Kent, puts cleaning one's slate in a wider philosophical context.

William Smook is a Cape Town-based journalist and subeditor, and Vice-Chairman of the Cape Town Press Club

'Invisible Allies' by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: The Harvill Press, 1997, £9.99

The Right Revd Richard Chartres is the Bishop of London

Gerald Pillay assesses one country's bold-and controversial-bid to come to terms with its past.

When Czechoslovak student protester Jan Palach set himself alight in 1969, Jara Moserova-Davidova was one of the specialists who treated him. Now head of UNESCO in the Czech Republic she has lived under Nazi and communist oppression-and seen both systems collapse. She talks to Mary Lean.

Professor Eduard Kellenberger witnessed one of the great scientific breakthroughs of the century. He talks to Alan Channer about genes, ethics and society.

In Poland, East Germany and Czechoslovakia, John Williams finds that the 'smiling revolution' was built on an uncompromising search for truth.