It was one of the many ironies of the end of the Cold War that if you were in your own eyes a ‘generous’ Westerner, you imagined that anyone coming to visit from Eastern Europe would be dazzled by everything they saw - and very grateful for whatever you gave them. But that wasn't how it worked. Surviving for years under a despotic regime, living in a place where you have to queue for every potato, doesn’t make you more humble, as we seemed to think it should, or nicer or better than anyone else. And if you spent a good part of your life fantasising about Western abundance it only made you more resentful of the moral and economic rationing to which you were likely to be subjected once you were within physical reach of Bond Street or the King’s Road.

Mary-Kay Wilmers, The Eitingons