Timothy Garton Ash on the Velvet Revolutions of 1989, from today’s Guardian.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/nov/06/-sp-fall-berlin-wall-what-it-meant-to-be-there
His first hand account, The Magic Lanetrn, first published as We Are the People, is a vivid and even thrilling account of what it was like to be there. I had the good fortune, a few years ago to talk to some who were there in Leipzig, Berlin, Prague and Budapest.
RGS History 