That he still bore scars is what I’ve always thought so beautiful. It’s what’s intrigued me more than almost anything else all these years about the story so many celebrate at Easter all over the world, believers, half-believers, unbelievers too. The story of resurrection, the idea of it, the hope of it.
It’s an image which has always haunted me, the first image of John Bunyan’s classic work, The Pilgrim’s Progress; haunting, as I said, but also strangely comforting.
He was an unlikely president, a playwright and political dissident: Václav Havel, president of Czechoslovakia in the early 1990s, just after the fall of Communism.