Václav Havel, playwright, philosopher and president of the Czech Republic, who has died aged 75, played not just a central role in the 1989 overthrow of communism but in his country’s national life for years afterwards. He remained what he had always been: a dissident.

His principled opposition to the diehard communist regime installed after the 1968 Soviet-led invasion made him a quintessential eastern European nonconformist. He later became an eloquently sceptical celebrant of the freedoms brought by the anti-communist revolts.

He held to his essential, paradoxical beliefs: the need to speak the truth, and to beware the power of words. For Havel, a once-banned writer, truth and words were the only weapons he allowed himself. He will be remembered as a symbol of the struggle against Soviet dominance, and as leader of Czechoslovakia’s “Velvet” revolution.