“Milosz was always worried that he had betrayed his homeland by leaving it and was glad to return to newly free Poland for the final years of his life. He was welcomed as a literary giant. But like many east European intellectuals who flourished in adversity, he had little to say directly about the new era of uncaptive minds. ‘Intellectuals have a certain image of things and don’t know very well what is going on beneath, in people’s heads, after those decades of totalitarian smashing and modelling’.”