People like Roger Scruton

Notes from Underground is a 2014 novel by the English writer Roger Scruton. It is set in Prague in the 1980s and follows a young Czech writer, Jan Reichl, who becomes involved with an underground intellectual scene. Jan ends up in the United States where he later, in the early 21st century, examines his experiences. The title references Fyodor Dostoyevsky's novel with the same title. The book received the bronze prize in the "Suspense / Thriller" category at the 2015 Independent Publisher Book Awards.

From 1979 until he was expelled from Czechoslovakia in the mid 1980s, Roger Scruton had been involved in setting up an underground university in Prague in collaboration with the dissident Jiří Müller. Scruton noted that many of the young people he encountered could not be described as dissidents of the kind that Western media were promoting, as being a dissident had become a social status in itself, unobtainable for most people.