If during the 80s and 90s you were any kind of book lover, Milan Kundera – who died this week aged 94 – was one of that small clutch of modern novelists you absolutely had to read. In the late stages of the Cold War, the Czech-born Kundera not only gave us news about what was happening on the other side of the Iron Curtain – how those brought up under communism joked, suffered, survived and made love – but his irony and playfulness, oddly hard-nosed, caught the spirit of the times.