Michael Church recalls his friend, the esteemed John Peter John Peter defected to the West, aged 18, in 1956, later becoming chief theatre critic of The Sunday Times AS a student I sometimes used to mug up for my weekly essay in the Bodleian Library in Oxford. And every time I went, I noticed another student always there. He would be sitting as still as a statue, gaze fixed firmly on his book; nothing ever disturbed his concentration, which he kept up hour after hour, week after week. Five years later I ran into him at a party in London: John Peter, a live-wire Hungarian who had defected to the West in 1956. I had become a vociferously radical schoolteacher, and he suggested that I might enjoy working at