Richard Gott

What do we remember about Cornelius Cardew? That he was a brilliant avant-garde composer who pioneered free improvisation and led a Scratch Orchestra of musicians and artists; that he wrote a polemical tract alleging that Stockhausen ‘serves imperialism’; and that, after spending a decade as a prominent Maoist, he was killed by a hit-and-run driver, in an apparent accident that conspiracy theorists have liked to construe as the work of the intelligence services.

At one end of the desolate park that stretches down from the public buildings of Asunción to the bay adjacent to the Paraguay River, where conquistadors first found refuge in the 16th century, stands a strange construction of concrete and metal that looks more like a contemporary artwork than a memorial. Scrambled within the cement are bronze hands sticking out and an upturned human face, crushed beneath an immense cube of concrete: the destroyed remains of the statue of General Alfredo Stroessner, one of the infamous dictators of the second half of the 20th century. He ruled here for 34 years, from a coup in 1954 until his overthrow in 1989, an annus mirabilis in Paraguay as well as in Eastern Europe.

For a schoolboy at Winchester in the 1950s, it was difficult to avoid the dramatic tombstone in the college cloisters. The memorial carries the simple legend WAVELL, deeply etched into the surface of a stone buried horizontally in the grass, and it joins those of other Wykehamists who are remembered there: George Mallory, lost on Everest in 1924, and William Whiting, who wrote the hymn...