I come home from a two-week vacation to the expected pile of mail, including the far-too-many magazines I subscribe to. One of the first that I pick up to read is the one I have several times mentioned here as a favorite, Literary Review.

On page 11 of the August issue, Bernard O’Donoghue reviews W.J. McCormack’s new book on W.B. Yeats. He, O’Donoghue, takes rather a strong line on Yeats’s political sympathies — a stronger line than I took when reviewing Roy Foster’s wonderful biography of the poet.

The review ends thus:

“If Yeats — or, more crucially [Why ‘more crucially?–JD], T.S. Eliot [Don’t get me started–JD] or Richard Wagner — can be cleared of the charge of anti-Semitism … it is vital that the charges be heard and, you might hope, refuted. The way the Academy closed ranks, for example, against the patent demonstration of anti-Semitism in Eliot’s writing by Anthony Julius and Tom Paulin with cries of trahison des clercs was not healthy. On the other hand, we might worry that our own individual silences (and silence in the face of outrage is what Yeats is primarily accused of here) about Abu Ghraib or Guantanamo will not look so easily forgivable sixty years on.”

Liberals of the O’Donoghue stripe really believe that the hanky-panky at Abu Ghraib and the detention, in spotless conditions, of murderers in Guantanamo Bay, are the great horrors of our age.

Is there any way we might force these dimwits to take a good look at prison conditions in Syria, Cuba, North Korea, Zimbabwe…? I guess not. It would make no difference, anyway.