“For elderly men of a literary bent in central Europe, the past is not another country. Zygmunt Bauman, the Leeds-based social philosopher, it now transpires, was a teenage secret policeman as a young communist in his native post-war Poland. And a few months after he died, triggering innumerable paeans to his talents and insights, Ryszard Kapuscinski, it turns out, also struck a Faustian bargain with the commies…. The real moral question is, how did he deliver on the Faustian pact?”