I was once walking down Hayarkon Street in Tel Aviv when someone pointed to an elderly man on the far side and said, “That’s Max Brod.” I’ve no idea if it really was him, but it’s been enough to feed my imagination. Back in Prague in the early twentieth century, Max Brod was a close friend of Franz Kafka, and one of those who used to meet to listen to Kafka read his work aloud. They thought the stories were funny, Brod has recorded; how they all laughed! Kafka made Brod his literary executor, with instructions to burn his manuscripts. Brod didn’t.

A few years later, the Germans occupied Czechoslovakia, and Brod fled with a suitcase containing the unpublished work, including The Trial and The Castle. The world is in his debt for saving Kafka’s work not once but twice.

Kafka’s great theme is that everyone feels guilt without ever being able quite to find out why. Nobody before him had taken the measure of our times like that, but he has been proved right as totalitarianisms, political correctness, affirmative action, positive discrimination, the culture of apology and compensation, and all the rest of it tie us up in tangles of guilt about things for which we aren’t responsible — and in such a way that struggling to get free of the guilt only makes it worse.

There’s more illumination to come: Brod left that suitcase to his lady friend, Esther Hoffe, and she in turn bequeathed it to her two daughters, now in their seventies. They have prevented all researchers from looking at the material; presumably they hoped to sell what they have, and a German library is said to be their choice of buyer. The Israeli Supreme Court has now ordered that these papers be opened, and of course the Israeli National Library wants to acquire them as part of the Jewish heritage.

According to the latest news, there is indeed a complete unpublished story. This whole saga seems to prove Kafka’s vision, though whether any of us can still laugh about it is another matter.

The Gurkhas are soldiers from Nepal who volunteer for the British army. Presently they are serving in Afghanistan. They are the bravest of the brave, and over the years have done wonderful service. The roll-call of Gurkhas who have won the Victoria Cross, the highest award for bravery, is awe-inspiring. A traditional weapon of theirs is the kukri, a curved short sword. It is said that the sound of Gurkhas sharpening their kukris was enough to frighten the Japanese in the Second World War.

It so happened recently that some Gurkhas were discriminated against by foolish paper-shufflers in Whitehall, and told they were not eligible to live in England. Uproar followed. There was a mass campaign. The Gurkhas were then treated properly, and Gordon Brown was forced to apologize for the unfairness. It was a big step in the disintegration of his government.

Gurkha battalions have British officers, and they are among the best in the army, too. One of them was Major James Bowman. A renegade Afghan policeman entered the Gurkha barracks and shot Major Bowman dead in his sleep.  Now we learn that, at the same time, the Gurkhas were in action in Helmand, in pursuit of a top Taliban commander. Under heavy fire, they killed him. Orders were to establish the commander’s identity. It was too dangerous to drag him out while still engaged with the Taliban, so a Gurkha cut his head off with his kukri. Quick thinking, you may say.

This man ought to be promoted. Instead, he has been recalled to Britain and may face court-martial and jail. The foolish paper-shufflers are at it again. The story goes that by cutting off the commander’s head, the Gurkha has offended Muslims, on the grounds that their custom is to bury bodies whole. What nonsense this is, what an example of the self-abasement now habitual whenever we come up against Islam in any shape or form. And the renegade Afghan policeman who shot Major Bowman in his sleep wasn’t giving offense? If this Gurkha is indeed prosecuted, another mass campaign will start, and it may be a step in the disintegration of the Cameron government.

The French are practiced hands at scandals, and there’s a fine one running at the moment. Hard to disentangle, it seems to begin with Madame Liliane Bettencourt, aged 87. She’s inherited L’Oréal cosmetics, and a fortune of about sixteen billion euros makes her one of the richest women in Europe. She’s given away vast sums to unlikely people, because in the opinion of her daughter, she has dementia. One of those she’s favoured is Eric Woerth, the Labour Minister in Sarkozy’s government and treasurer of Sarkozy’s political party. The old lady’s butler became suspicious of Woerth, and secretly taped the fellow’s conversations with his employer. (Agatha Christie, where are you?) The two talked about money, cash, secret Swiss accounts, a yacht, oh, and the Jews. An investigation has cleared Woerth of allegations that he protected Madame Bettencourt from a tax inquiry, but he has had to resign as party treasurer. President Sarkozy went on television to deny that Madame Bettencourt illegally funded him or his party; lies are flying around just to block the reforms he proposes but never quite gets round to carrying out. He put the rhetorical question to the camera, “Can you see me collecting envelopes?” To which the nation is roaring the answer, Easily!

A counterpoint to this is the running saga of Islamic face veils. Everyone in the new Europe has to learn to distinguish the hijab from the burqa and the niqab. Sarkozy let it be known that France is a secular republic, and for women to hide their face behind a veil goes against the republic’s dearest values. Deputies in the Assembly have voted almost unanimously to ban Islamic face veils, 335 votes for the proposition, just one against. Belgium has already voted to do this, and Spain and Italy are about to vote on it too. Actually, only about 2,000 women are thought to wear the full veil in France. Under the law, police will have to stop veiled women in the street, and fine them 150 euros and order them to attend citizenship classes. There’s a good deal of roaring about that, too. Muslim women, supported by the Left, are insisting that the state has no business decreeing what women wear. They are also saying that it will make women’s plight worse, because now the males in charge will lock away all females. Anyhow, the policing will prove impossible, and if the law passes the next hurdles of the Senate and the Constitutional Council, it will surely fail in the European Court of Human Rights, which is the home-grown version of sharia when it comes to tenderness for Muslims.

By the way, unlike France and the issue of veiling, England is doing its best to make Muslims feel at home. A Yorkshire council has agreed to install Turkish lavatories in its shopping malls — those are the kind for squatting over a porcelain hole in the ground rather than sitting on a pedestal. Mark Steyn, are you there?

Occasionally you get glimpses of how things really are, and Frances Guy has given us just such a glimpse. She has been the British Ambassador in Lebanon since 2006, and is said to have a lot of Middle East experience. Her employers, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, had up on their website this week her extraordinary obituary of Sheikh Muhammad Fadlallah, a Shia cleric and former guiding spirit of Hezbollah, Iran’s armed militia and proxy in Lebanon. The title of her obituary tells all: “The Passing of a Decent Man.” She writes, “The world needs more men like him willing to reach out across faiths.” He was a man she most respected, she burbles.

This decent man, this man to be respected, was a mass-murderer. In 1983, Fadlallah was responsible for sending Hezbollah members in trucks loaded with explosives into the barracks in Beirut of American and French troops come to keep the peace there. Almost 300 of these soldiers were killed. Fadlallah has always praised suicide bombing and hostage-taking. As for his willingness to reach out across faiths, this decent man worthy of Mrs. Guy’s respect consistently preached the extermination of Jews, praised suicide bombing, and denied the Holocaust. How a British diplomat comes to toady to prejudice and blood-lust ought to be a major scandal. Instead of firing this Ambassador, the Foreign Office is merely tut-tutting.

By coincidence, a judicial travesty unfolding at the same moment involves two convicted Islamist terrorists currently serving sentences in British jails. One of them is Abu Hamza, the cleric whose arms were blown off and fitted instead with hooks. He is wanted in the United States on charges of terrorism in Yemen. He and the other prisoner have appealed to the European Court of Human Rights against extradition orders on the grounds that they might face a life sentence without parole, and this would be a breach of their rights. They are playing one jurisdiction off against another in a lawyers’ paradise that amounts to making a mockery of justice. Instead of throwing out this flagrant abuse, the Court wants more time to examine the implications. The terrorists may well be released at the end of their present sentences before they can be extradited to face other grave charges.

I think it may have been Sadiq el-Azm, a Syrian and a philosopher, who first formulated the choice that is currently working itself out:  either Islam Europeanizes or Europe Islamizes. Ambassador Guy and the European Court are helping to bring on a future in which neither of them will have any role at all.

Desperate times require desperate measures, to be sure, but it is rather a joke that Belgium is hoping to save itself by getting its citizens to dance on the streets of a dozen major cities.

The fact is that there are two populations, Flemings who are of Dutch origin and Walloons who are of French origin, and neither can stand the other. They both want out, the Flemings have even voted for it, and the break-up of this artificial country looms. In an eleventh-hour ploy, some bright spark has commissioned a pop song with alternate Dutch and French lyrics, and a lady called Maria-Clara Villa Lobos is choreographing how Belgians are to dance to this. (An expatriate from Brazil, she’s presumably a relation of Villa Lobos, that country’s most prominent composer.)

The dancing couples are supposed to be staging a mock fight, hitting one another with their elbows, only to kiss and make up. “We are different,” Marie-Clara says, “we are two people but can do things together.” These are strange times in Europe, of course, but can Belgians really be infantilized to this degree?

What makes the Russians good at spying? Presumably the same national trait that makes them good chess players. They think ahead. One of their best subterfuges in the Cold War was the placing of agents known as “sleepers,” who were usually young, had a false identity, and were simply left alone to make what career they could. So they put a teenager into South Africa; he joined the navy and became commander of the Simonstown base, a key component in Western defenses. So in West Germany they put in place Günter Guillaume, who after some years became the adviser of Willi Brandt, a man actually longing to be deceived by Communists.

Now post-Cold War Russians are shown to have put in place in the United States a whole ring of agents. Christopher Metsos, no doubt not his real name, was the man who gave them their funds. Arrested in Cyprus, he was bailed for not much more than $20,000, which was small beer to him, to be paid right then and there in cash. The Cypriot judge responsible has some explaining to do. Russia uses Cyprus as an off-shore bank. Of course Metsos has vanished, presumably via the Turkish part of Cyprus, buying his way out.

It’s all very well to joke about these people, and mock them as pseudo-suburbanites with out-of-date techniques who attracted the CIA’s attention and could not achieve anything. It is impossible to know how far they penetrated and whom they may have suborned. The mere fact of their activity also reveals how fatuous it is to babble about the reset button in relations with the Kremlin.

Another thing: A couple of these spies have been passing themselves off as British. The British authorities threw a fit recently when someone cloned British identities in order to kill a Hamas armorer in Dubai, and with impeccable self-righteousness they ordered an Israeli diplomat out of the country. When Russians fake British identity, these same British authorities are merely amused. Now why the disproportion?

And while we’re on disproportion, take today’s International Herald Tribune. I happen to be in Europe right now, and it was available, so I read it, always a mistake. As though the world has no other subject, its paltry pages carry no fewer than three hostile articles about Israel, and also a letter from an Arab in Amman defending Gaza. One article claims that foreign workers in Israel get a bad deal. The second article says the Israelis have messed up, and there is a rift in the government. In the third article, Nicholas D. Kristof outdoes the others. He writes that the Israeli occupation is immoral, wrong, carefully omitting any mention that the occupation exists in the first place only because the former Arab owners came to make war on Israel, were warned not to, but came all the same and now don’t like paying the price for their aggression. Oh, how pleasant it is for a journalist to moralize on matters for which he has no responsibility. I award an annual prize for Outstanding Prig of the Year, and Kristof is a strong contender.

Editor’s note: This item has been amended since its original posting.

Let’s consider Iran and Saudi Arabia; imagine for a moment what life in either of these leading Muslim countries must be like. Both are in the grip of Islamist ideologies, rivals because the one is Shia and the other Sunni, but both have the common property of promoting fantasies so far removed from human reality that they have to maintain police states for the sake of enforcement. The costs are terrible.

Where Iran is concerned, it is hard to be accurate, but human-rights organizations identify at least 50 people who have been hanged in the month of June alone, and at least 30 more were hanged in May. Several victims have been hoisted for execution on a crane, and in public, too. A photograph on the web shows ten men in Ghezel Hesar prison standing side by side on a scaffold with a noose round their necks, in effect torturing before killing them. The victims are accused of drug trafficking or rape, though Abdolmalek Rigi, aged 26, was hanged like his brother before him supposedly for leading an armed Sunni group in this Shia dictatorship. Were the two brothers really guilty? Their confessions on television followed closely the model of Stalin’s show trials: The old Communist accusation of “enemy of the people” neatly morphs into “enemy of God.” Ayatollah Khamenei has just reprieved 81 political prisoners, but another 450 are said to be held in detention without trial. Babak Heshmat Saran is just one of them. A student, he went to demonstrate on the anniversary of last year’s stolen election, was picked up by the police, and has disappeared ever since.

It’s also not clear how many people have been publicly beheaded this year in Saudi Arabia. But daily existence brings its cruelties and absurdities, especially through the deranged view held there about the relationship between the sexes. A young woman at a college was taken ill. The ambulance men arrived, but were refused entry because they were men. While they were all prevaricating, the woman died. Elsewhere, the police arrested a group for having a mixed party, and sentenced 15 of them to prison and flogging. One woman, a minor, was sentenced to 80 lashes, enough to disfigure permanently, even to cause death. Saudi women are allowed to be in the company only of male relatives, but a sheikh who is also an adviser to the ruling family has found a way to get round this prohibition. According to his fatwa, women who come into contact with unrelated men have to breastfeed them, whereupon they are considered members of the family rather than potential lovers. The big disputed issues of the day in Saudi Arabia are whether the man should suckle directly, which might prove erotic, or whether the woman should express her milk for him into a glass, and what is to be done about women who do not lactate.

In previous times, the view here would have been that, if Iranian and Saudi despots set up a society that depends on murdering or denaturing their subjects and making laughingstocks of them, so be it, they’re the losers. That won’t do now. Iran and Saudi Arabia are extending their range and influence among us, and though their Shia and Sunni ideologies are at loggerheads, both are making universal claims that no free individual could possibly accommodate. Failure to confront them would leave civilization itself the loser.

Sometimes you come across people who elevate the meaning of life by showing courage in the face of adversity. Simon Lewis is one such. A young and successful movie maker in Los Angeles, he and his recently married wife Marcy went out to celebrate the purchase of a new car. Marcy was the marketing director at the Performing Arts Center of Los Angeles County. On the road, an unregistered white Chevy van shot a stop sign and hit them sideways at high speed. Marcy was killed outright. Simon was so badly hurt that he was given no chance of surviving. There was nothing that could have saved them. This was really the hand of black fate.

Simon has just published Rise and Shine, his account of the fifteen years of medical care, operations, and personal and family heartbreak that finally culminated in his recovery. Self-pity would have been only normal, but the book is magnificently free of it. Instead, it is an account of the struggle to recover from a blow as severe as this. Here also are insights into the practice of medicine in the United States, and the many fine doctors, surgeons, and nurses who restored Simon. The costs were beyond the family’s means (and, of course, kept on rising), but the insurance company did the right thing in the end. All of it is heart-warming.

I have never actually met Simon, though we have spoken on the telephone and we exchanged e-mails when I gave him some advice on how he should write his book. He is the son of friends from London who long ago emigrated to California, and he is a cousin of Bernard Lewis, the renowned scholar of Islam. The publisher of Rise and Shine is the Santa Monica Press, not one of the nation’s great publishing houses and maybe unable to command the publicity this book deserves. I think every reader will have a lump in the throat in memory of Marcy, murdered by a stranger who did not stop and who escaped from the law, too. And every reader will also be moved to salute Simon for setting an extraordinary example of the human spirit.

Seventy years ago, the German general Kurt von Briesen led his troops in a parade down the Champs-Élysées in Paris. Photographs and film show the general rising on his stirrups in the excitement of victory, and rank upon rank of Wehrmacht soldiers marching in good order. Not a shot had been fired at them. When these troops had entered the city 24 hours previously, a French colonel tried to mount a machine gun, but two of his own fleeing soldiers shot him dead. Now these photographs and film show many Parisians lining the street as their conquerors marched past, and there is no element of defiance to be discerned. The physical and moral collapse of the French was complete.

And so Nazism had defeated democracy. Hitler had the whole continent of Europe at his mercy, and could have ruled it till the end of his days, so destroying freedom and culture, in effect knocking out everything the West is supposed to stand for. On June 23, Hitler made his one and only visit to Paris, to see the Opera, whose architecture he admired. In his entourage were Gen. Hans Speidel, the post-war commander of NATO, no less, and the sculptor Arno Breker. Instead of consolidating, he miscalculated that the invasion of the Soviet Union was the necessary preliminary to eliminating Britain. By the time he was proven wrong, Germany and most of Europe was a ruin.

And 70 years ago, Marshal Philippe Pétain asked for an armistice; in other words, surrendered. At which point, Gen. Charles de Gaulle flew to London, where he went to the BBC and broadcast that he was forming a resistance movement. Afterwards he inspected his men, who numbered just above 100. At the time, thousands of French soldiers and sailors had just been evacuated from Dunkirk, but almost unanimously they chose to return to France and enjoy surrendering. Practically no Frenchmen seem to have heard de Gaulle’s broadcast, let alone obeyed it. The Pétain regime condemned him to death for treason. Of course he was a rather preposterous fellow, but that June 18 was his moment of greatness.

The drama of that moment has something to say about the role played by character in the making of history. Five grim years were to pass before the human overcame the inhuman. If only it was easy to believe that this must always be the outcome.

The European Union exists to overcome the nationalism that has put the countries of the continent to cross-purposes. As W. H. Auden put it in another context, we must love one another or die. Away with the nation-state, then, as a necessary step in the love-in.

Well, in Belgium, the heart of the EU, whose capital Brussels is also the EU’s capital, they don’t love one another, not one bit. The country is divided into Dutch-speaking Flemings and French-speaking people known as Walloons. The Flemings think that the Walloons are living on hand-outs from them, and the Walloons resent being patronized and talked down to. In the general election that’s just been held, the New Flemish Alliance, led by a chubby young man called Bart de Wever, came out with more seats than any other party. And its platform is separatist; it wants an independent Flemish state, in effect telling the Walloons to go walk the plank.

Something of the same thing has happened simultaneously in the Netherlands. Geert Wilders and his Freedom Party have greatly increased their share of the vote in the general election there. Wilders wants the Netherlands to be for the Dutch, which means stopping Muslim immigration and making sure that those Muslims already in the country adopt Dutch values.

Belgium and the Netherlands have long traditions of government by coalition, but in these circumstances they are going to have great trouble forming coalitions, trouble to the point of having to do without a government for an extended period, trying to make ever shabbier deals in back rooms. That’s also how the EU operates, but the examples of Belgium and the Netherlands make the whole process superfluous, pointless, too ironic to be anything except laughable.

Meanwhile the euro is hanging on by its fingernails. Greece is very likely to default on its gigantic debt, amassed by long-term lying. Every top Spaniard is shouting that Spanish banks are fully capitalized and aren’t in financial trouble; the media say the opposite and point out that one Spaniard in five is unemployed. Much the same in Ireland, Portugal, and Italy. The trillions for bailing them out aren’t there. Unions everywhere are responding to the coming cuts in public-sector spending by preparing to strike. It’s front-page news when the German chancellor and the French president address each other civilly. The political gang-masters are too busy condemning Israel for defending itself to find time for anything constructive. That noise audible in the background, in short, is the death rattle of the European Union and the rebirth of the nation-state.

The whole world has heard of the Guggenheim museum that has put the Spanish city of Bilbao on the map. Its architect is Frank Gehry, and lots of people consider what he built a work of genius. The King of Spain is quoted as saying that this is the very best of modern buildings. I had looked forward to seeing it.

However, I went first to the Museum of Fine Arts. It was virtually empty. Spanish Christian art is well represented. So is El Greco. There is a very fine and thoughtful portrait by Goya of his friend Martin Zapater. Also some beautiful pictures by an eighteenth century landscapist Luis Paret.

Nearby is the Guggenheim. The building gives you a charge of ugliness like an electric shock. It looks like a heap of gigantic discarded sardine tins, all without form, meaningless. The interior is a mess of struts, iron girders, asymmetrical shapes, and corridors. Unlike the contents of the Museum of Fine Arts, there is nothing on show that connects with human beings, either in body or spirit. Everything here is remote from lived experience, without sympathy for the human condition and therefore with nothing to say. The notes on the wall about one “artist” serve to represent them all. This poor fellow “researched, materialised, and drew connections between concepts such as the limit, the void, space, and scale, subjected to the signification of the material, which constitutes his artistic vocabulary.” That sentence could cover any of the works on show, and it is as meaningless as everything else here.

Worst of all, the museum was packed. Groups of schoolchildren had evidently been dragooned to come here for brainwashing. But the many outwardly normal visitors were more disturbing. What are they doing in this temple of fraud? Do they not realize that this is anti-art, a denial of everything human, in a word degradation?

Bilbao is a city with an attractive historic centre, in which is a cathedral, not one of the greatest, but Gothic, at least, a place in which to cleanse the spirit after the Guggenheim and even to say a prayer for poor Europe, whose culture has been reduced to this.

The Gaza flotilla and its fate have brought into relief the crisis which must one day burst in the Middle East. Ensconced after a coup in the Gaza strip, and more than just a political obstacle to peace, Hamas is deliberately seeking war with Israel, and a war of extermination at that. This challenge is inhuman on the one hand, but on the other it appears so uneven that it is ridiculous. However, Hamas pays no heed to considerations like morality or the balance of power because it is not the usual type of nationalist movement, but an ideology, and as such driven by irrational forces, for instance faith, for instance emotion. An ideology fails only when reality catches up with it. Reality may come in the shape of superior force, as was the case with Nazism, or in the shape of bankruptcy, as was the case with Communism.

Either outcome is possible here. Israel might be obliged one day to put a stop to the belligerence of Hamas, which continues to allow rockets to be fired from Gaza and has held for four years a kidnapped Israeli soldier. Iran finances and arms the movement, and might one day realize that this investment brings only costs, not benefits.

The people of Gaza are also prisoners of the ideology. Ostensibly, they turn out for demonstrations, they claim to be volunteering for suicide and martyrdom, they militarize their children. What they are really thinking in their inner selves is unknowable. In my experience, they wish for peace at any price but they are in the position of everyone forced to live under ideological leadership, too terrified of repression to speak out.

The activists on the ships are helping the leaders of Hamas to retain power, and thus postponing the moment of reality when the ordinary people might have the chance to be responsible for themselves. It is disgusting that these activists almost all live abroad, and so are running a small risk but exposing the Gazans to a much larger and more frightening risk in the future. The activists on the Rachel Corrie, for example — the Irish Nobel Prize lady, the Swedish writer by the name of Mankell — usually wearing the fancy dress of a Palestinian scarf or keffiya, are engaged in a theatre of self-promotion, for which the Gazans will pay the price. Which leads to one further question. If Hamas happened to be successful in its war of extermination, would these activists be proud to have played their part in piling up corpses in Tel Aviv? It’s a simple matter — either they are moral idiots, or crypto-Nazis.

You have to give it to the Palestinians — their publicity-military stunts are in a class of their own. The Gaza flotilla in the news today is an outstanding example of the cunning and imaginative aggression that Palestinian activists have been perfecting for years now.

The opening move has invariably been to discover what is in their capacity to harm Israel. If Israel decides simply to absorb losses, then the Palestinians have a satisfying sense of being one up. Suicide bombers are an excellent example. They killed lots of Israelis and further militarized the Palestinians, and all that happened was that the Israelis cut their losses by building a fence. And this gave rise to the next move, turning what was their initial aggression into propaganda that Israel has put up another Berlin Wall, had stolen land, was an apartheid state, and the rest of it. In short, it was a win for the Palestinians either way.

Firing thousands of rockets against Israel, Hamas was similarly on a two-way bet. For a long time Israel did nothing, which allowed Hamas to boast that it was the “resistance.” When Israel finally retaliated, Hamas depicted the damage they brought on themselves as a war crime, neatly and rewardingly reversing the roles of aggressor and victim.

The Gaza flotilla was another certain winner of the same kind. Either Israel let it through, in which case Hamas had scored a coup. In the tried and tested Palestinian style, the flotilla’s organizers made sure to have on board children, elderly people, and Europeans, whose possible injury would certainly make the Israelis look bad. They couldn’t have cared less about that. They anticipated correctly that Israel was certain to inspect the ships for possible smuggling of armaments and ferrying in gunmen, that casualties were likely, and that the world would condemn Israel for defending itself. Easy, once you have the template for it.

Turkish sponsorship of this stunt is the one thing that matters. Whipping up anti-Israeli hysterics, the Turkish prime minister and his government openly declare that Turkey now opts for a Muslim and not a secular or Western identity. The consequences of losing Turkey are going to cause a lot of grief to a lot of people.

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I spent the week-end celebrating a wedding. The bride and bridegroom made a fine couple. The church was very old, with a magnificent Norman arch and medieval wall decorations. Afterwards we repaired to a nearby great house built in the seventeenth century of beautiful grey stone, with a chapel of its own, mullion windows, statues, a vast lawn and gardens which I in my ignorance only then learnt are famous. Everything was perfect, in other words, here was a traditional moment of the kind that has made England what it is, and formed the loyalty of its daughters and sons.

In the course of his speech in her honour, the father of the bride then informed the audience that the European Union has passed a Gender Equality Bill. One provision of this preposterous and impudent measure is that fathers are no longer allowed to give away their daughters in the traditional church ceremony. Apparently that is to treat daughters as chattels. The whole European Union is on the point of breaking up, Greece is in flames and the Germans about to rebel, several countries in the eurozone are bankrupt beyond redemption, the euro itself has failed and soon there may be no currency for Europeans to trade in — and the giant statesmen of Brussels come up with a prohibition on fathers giving away their daughters in marriage as fathers have done in country after country, century after century.

All is not lost. Princess Victoria of Sweden is engaged to be married. I shall never forget the grace and elegance with which she escorted an aged prize-winner who could hardly walk to dinner at the Nobel Prize ceremony in Stockholm in 2000. She has presence. Heir to the throne, she is insisting that her father, the King, give her away. The more the Swedish church says this can’t now be done, the more she protests that she will have her way. May she and the King remember their Vasa royal predecessors, Queen Christina, Charles XII, the days when Sweden was a great power, and may they help cover the great statesmen of Brussels with well-deserved ridicule.

Yesterday was the first day of a Parliament in Westminster with David Cameron as prime minister. Hope refreshed, no? All that change we were promised?

Well, the first piece of business was the installation of the speaker, one John Bercow. Towards the end of the previous Parliament, he was railroaded into the office in place of the previous speaker, a venal and foolish old buffer who was the first speaker to be ejected since the 17th century. Bercow is a trimmer who changes his politics like a chameleon, all things to all men, unpopular, nicknamed the Greaser in the press. Gordon Brown and the Labour party voted for Bercow in a scorched-earth mood, to hurt the Conservatives. It is customary for speakers to be unopposed in general elections, but a raft of candidates stood against him, in, alas, a seat so safe that he got reelected. At the beginning of a Parliament, it is a convention that members have only to shout No to the nomination of the speaker. Some duly shouted, but it was then judged that those who shouted Yes were louder. So this Parliament has a speaker whom nobody respects.

Meanwhile George Osborne, the new chancellor of the exchequer, was in Brussels because the European Union is deciding to regulate the hedge-fund industry, almost all of which operates out of London. As usual, the measure is designed to hurt British interests. And what does the hapless Osborne do? He concedes, saying it is too late to do anything about it, and he doesn’t want to lose political capital by objecting.

As if all this wasn’t damaging enough, a High Court judge, Mr. Justice Mitting, declared that two al-Qaeda terrorists — caught red-handed about to kill a large number of people in a shopping mall — could not be deported to their native Pakistan because they might be ill-treated there. On the contrary, they have to be released. Their human rights count for more than the human rights of those they were planning to murder. A society with an attitude like that will not survive, and doesn’t deserve to.

Yesterday was a bad day, and if we are to continue in this way, then the electorate will conclude that tomorrow is no different from Labour’s disastrous yesterday, and a Conservative government serves no useful purpose.

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– The Editors

Here I am on the NR cruise, isolated on the river Douro somewhere between Portugal and Spain, and this is not a position in which to follow political events in Britain. I have felt nothing but forebodings since the Conservatives failed to win a majority. It has seemed clear that David Cameron would abandon some principles to become prime minister, and the question was which principles, how far he would go to accommodate the Liberal Democrats, and whether this wouldn’t lead to irreparable damage to the Conservatives. Whether he has abandoned principles remains to be seen.

Of course it is a relief to be rid of Gordon Brown. He was a disastrous Prime Minister. It is hard to think of anything that he did right. After plotting for years against his colleague Tony Blair, he finally ousted him. How he wanted the job, how he and his spin-doctors presented him as someone whose whole career was directed towards this end! At last the right man was supposed to be in the right place. The Labour Party did not then elect him but had a coronation. Things went wrong thereafter. He immediately flunked a general election which he almost certainly would have won, in which case none of this downfall would have occurred and he’d still have a couple of years in office. Virtually all decisions Brown took were soon revealed to be mistaken. Worse, the man’s character was exposed. Evidently he was weak, defending himself as weak men do by being a bully. Nastiness in a prime minister makes for the disloyalty of subordinates and general inefficiency.

In Greek tragedy a favourite theme consists of the character who badly wants something, only to destroy himself when he obtains what he has wanted. Self-destruction comes from hubris, from the character’s mistaken belief that he has qualities, indeed a destiny, that in reality he does not have. As we NR cruisers enjoyed the Douro landscape I couldn’t help reflecting how perfectly Brown exemplifies this notion of tragedy. I felt what the spectator of a Greek tragedy is supposed to feel, at once delighted that nemesis has overtaken a flawed character, while also being sorry that he has to pay so humiliatingly for his faults. And naturally the famous judgement of Tacitus on the Emperor Galba also came to mind – “capax imperii nisi imperasset.” My English translation of the idiomatic Latin will have to do, “He seemed capable of ruling until he actually came to rule.”
 

These are the last 48 hours before the general election in Britain. On all sides you hear that the campaign of all parties has been boring and irrelevant. Commentators are attaching the label of “anti-politics” to the general attitude of the public. Two immense scandals are in the air, it is true, and the voters can do little about it. The first scandal is that Members of Parliament almost without exception have taken advantage of a procedure that has been unbelievably lax but hidden from view allowing them to claim expenses. In effect they have been leeching money out of the taxpayer on a massive and disgraceful scale. You have to go back to the eighteenth century, to two notorious figures, the Duke of Newcastle and Lord Rockingham, to find this sort of naked embezzling. Those aristocrats at least built splendid houses and lived in style. Today’s wretches have nothing to show for their greed.

The second scandal is that Britain is in disastrous economic shape. The 13 years of Blair and Brown have left the country on the edge of insolvency. Again, you have to go back 200 years to find incompetence at this level. Outgoing prime minister Gordon Brown is the culprit, totally unbelievable when he repeats in his grim way that he alone can get the country out of the mess which is his gift to the nation. Nick Clegg on behalf of the other left-wing party, the Liberal Democrats, evidently doesn’t understand basic economics. Which leaves David Cameron, the Conservative challenger, who has an appealing manner but basically differs only in minute details from Brown. The winner of this election is going to have to cut public spending enormously and raise taxes. Greece, here we come.

Even at this late hour, the outcome of the election is unforeseeable, given the anomalies of the British system and the three-party race. Brown may have the lowest popular vote but still win the most seats, in which case in spite of the loss of authority he may cling Mugabe-like to the office of prime minister. A strange constitutional hiatus – a determined effort to dodge the electorate’s rejection — is a possibility.

The broader more interesting question is why Britain has come to this pass. In part or perhaps wholly, the answer seems to be that any form of socialism, even the Blair-Brown soft version of it, is a brilliant and unfailing device for impoverishing and infantilizing any country implementing it. Brown and Clegg promise more of the same, unable to recognize reality. Cameron may well win, and it would be for the best that he does so, but he too has so far been unable to engage the country in the adult and truthful debate that has to come, and soon.

The British general election began as rather sad stuff. I can’t think that any previous prime minister has been so disliked as Gordon Brown. Some of it is not his fault. For instance, he has a smile that gives him the look of a recently buried corpse. His whole manner, especially the incessant monotony of his way of speaking, gives away a truly misplaced self-importance. His own Labour Party has been trying to get rid of him ever since he took over by some sort of divine right from Tony Blair a couple of years ago. For the Conservatives, David Cameron was cutting him to pieces, the way the picador does to a bull in the ring, so that you can hardly bear to look.

It was courageous of Brown in the circumstances to agree to three television debates with Cameron: That ghastly smile was sure to give the nation an Edgar Allen Poe shudder. Neither man seems to have foreseen what the consequences would be of accepting that a third candidate join the debate, namely one Nick Clegg, leader of the minority Liberal Democrat party. It is safe to say that until then he was a nonentity. Only those with political interests could have identified the man, and few of them could have given a coherent account of any political program he might have.

Personally I thought this Clegg completely blew his chances in the two debates so far.  He revealed himself to be determined to abuse the privileges that had given him so many advantages of wealth, education and prospects. This is a very familiar English type, the fortunate upper-class man passing himself of as a Leftist. Clegg wants to abolish the nuclear weapon, to pass an amnesty for illegal immigrants, to have penal taxation, to join the euro and submit further to Brussels – the whole play-kit of these people who exploit their position to abuse everyone else. A would-be Obama, he bleats on and on about Change, (translation: Me in Downing Street, thank you).  Freakishly, the public has responded positively. Polls show that the Lib Dems are doing well enough to ensure that no party wins outright, and there will be a hung parliament. In which case Clegg will be the kingmaker, joining with Brown or Cameron in a coalition, presumably on his terms.

Today Ben Macintyre in The Times has an article revealing at last something original about this would-be Obama clone. (To declare an interest, Ben is a very old friend as well as a gifted writer). Clegg’s paternal grandfather married a Russian woman who was the niece of a famous figure, Baroness Moura Budberg. Well, I never! Nick’s great-great-aunt. She was known as Baroness Bedbug, on account of her affairs with famous men, among them Maxim Gorky and H.G. Wells. Gorky took her to meet Stalin and she arranged for Wells to interview him in the Kremlin in 1934. She took money from Beria and the NKVD, but also from the British intelligence services and probably others too. This rather fascinating monster lived not far from me in London and by the time I got to know her she had lost her looks, becoming fat, greedy and needy, and it was as well to come round to her apartment with a little present. She wore long dresses and huge and heavy necklaces, seemingly to appear like the last survivor from the Romanov era.  I think Peter Ustinov used to be generous to her. She had a low voice, and according to Ben she told her young nephew Nick, “Boy, you mumble too much.”

Recollection of Moura isn’t going to influence the election. It seems to me that Clegg’s burst of publicity is all hot air, ephemeral, escapist, a wish for something other than Brown’s sepulchral smile and Cameron’s picador style. But there’s one more television debate to go, and the electorate is evidently playing fast and loose. 

“Dirty work at the cross-roads”, used to be what schoolboys in England said about the tricks they played on one another. Well, there’s been some dirty work among English historians, comic in its way but also a glimpse into the special nastiness of the academy. A wonderful extra dimension is that those involved in the dirty work are Soviet-era specialists.

Amazon carries anonymous book reviews. Dr Rachel Polonsky is the author of Molotov’s Magic Lantern, an imaginative character sketch of the frightful Molotov – Stone Arse, in Stalin’s jovial nickname for him – from the books in his library. Under the signature “Historian” someone savaged it: “This is the sort of book that makes you wonder why it was ever published…Polonsky is not an academic…her writing is so dense and pretentious…”  Etc etc, and with a swipe at her chauffeur-driven car as well.

It turns out that Dr Polonsky some years back reviewed Natasha’s Dance, a book about Russian culture by Professor Orlando Figes of Birkbeck College, a younger historian whose books have been usually, and rightly, praised. I have reviewed one or two of them myself.  Polonsky’s review had evidently got under Figes’ skin and in the guise of “Historian” he was taking revenge. Polonsky worked out what Figes had done. More than that, she spotted that Figes/Historian had several times rubbished the books of Professor Robert Service, a very eminent writer on Soviet matters, author of biographies of Lenin, Stalin and Trotsky, winning a prize for the latter. She also worked out that Figes/Historian had praised one of his own books,” a rich and deeply moving history…which leaves the reader awed, humbled, yet uplifted…” Etc etc.

Polonsky informed Professor Service about her detective success, and he promptly sent informative emails to 31 leading historians. Figes brought in his lawyer, to say that all this was deliberate misinformation, and anyone who said otherwise would be sued.  A Mexican stand-off. But then a short time later this lawyer suddenly states that the anonymous reviews were written by Figes’ wife, but without his knowledge. Mrs Figes is a high-powered lawyer but not qualified to write about Soviet matters as far as is known.

Is it not all highly enjoyable? The last time I recall anyone reviewing himself favourably was when Anthony Burgess, that wayward genius, used a pseudonym to puff one of his own novels. The moral of the Historian saga is also clear: nothing very much is at stake in academic rows, which is precisely why the dirty work at the cross-roads is so unscrupulous and self-promoting.