On the night of 20 August 1968, a little before eleven o’clock, some 200,000 Warsaw Pact troops and 2,000 tanks crossed into Czechoslovakia to end the Prague Spring — eight months in which Alexander Dubček’s government had loosened censorship and talked, carefully, of socialism with a human face. By morning the streets of Prague were full of armour. Czechoslovaks were told not to fight, and mostly did not: they argued with the soldiers, painted over street names, turned the road signs around, and kept the radio on the air from hiding. More than a hundred civilians were killed. Dubček was taken to Moscow under arrest and brought back to sign the “normalisation” that would last two decades.

Fifty-eight years on, the detail that stays with me is the road signs: a whole country quietly pointing the wrong way.