With the fall of the Berlin Wall still fresh in 1991, I drove to Prague, just to see what it looked like. Beautiful and drab at once, it was a city that preserved a copious history, both ancient and recent, and a sensibility quite unlike any I had come across before: erudite, yearning and humble all at once. A few years later I moved to Budapest, a very different city, but one that shared a similar sense of wounded magnificence and of informed, tentative hope. Remaining there over much of the decade, I developed some sense of what it means to live through history. For these countries were, in those years, at the centre of a tremendous transformation, one that spiralled quickly outwards and came to engulf much of the rest of the world – extending, as I learned during a two-year stint in Senegal some time later, to Africa and beyond. As the Cold War thawed, it seemed to unleash all sorts of flows across the world's previously unyielding borders: of money, of people and, perhaps most of all, of ideas.

This book began life in my desire to understand and articulate my personal and professional experiences from those years, much of which I spent working in a field that has come to be known as ‘rule of law promotion’. That is the name given to an immense and still expanding body of practice aiming to reform and improve the laws and institutions of countries across the world.