Hanťa may be a beer-soaked idiot, as his boss call him, but he is an idiot with a difference - able to quote the Talmud, Hegel, Kant and Lao-tzu.

His bizarre and unwitting education is the product of the job he has been doing for the last thirty-five years in a police state; he compacts wastepaper and book into a pulp. In the process he has rescued...