Diary

2023: September 30: Julian Barnes reconfirmed in today’s Guardian what a classy individual Martin Amis was. Barnes talks about his final correspondence from MA: “At the end, I got an email saying, in effect, ‘Look after yourself, old friend.’ I took that as it was intended, which was ‘Goodbye.’” I was surprised to read that Amis accepted a knighthood shortly before he died.

Timothy Garton Ash makes the seemingly obvious point in the same paper that on the basis of old age and growing infirmity Biden should step aside and make room for a younger Democratic presidential candidate. Shapiro, Newsom and Whitmer all seem like plausibly arresting candidates and there would no doubt be others who would emerge if the opportunity beckoned. One wonders what’s the political calculus being pursued by Biden and his eminence grises in the White House right now? Perhaps we will find out over the coming weeks. It may be that Biden is the only recognised member of the Democratic Party who is capable of winning the floating voter and perhaps anti-Trump Republicans. This seems increasingly necessary given the entry of independent candidates such as Cornell West who will of course take votes from the Democrats rather than MAGA Republicans and mainstream GOP voters. The thought of Trump or one of his ilk becoming POTUS in 2024 is too terrible to dwell on.

2023: June 11: The idea that the centre is no longer holding in the world of politics is one that we are hearing more and more these days. But what does it mean? That moderation has lost its purchase? That the centre right and centre left no longer hold sway? Possibly. But surely there is something more fundamental at play than the decline of moderation and centrism. One is that the political landscape now has far more snakes than ladders; politicians who have not given up on truth and decency seem to be capable of winning only battles not wars, the forces of justice and the rule of law may achieve a victory but the growing sense is that these successes will prove ephemeral and soon be nullified by darker and more powerful forces. The welcome news that Trump has been indicted did not prompt the GOP, the “party of law and order”, to condemn him even though the charges include the unlawful retention of top secret papers about US security. No surprise there of course. The party of Lincoln has become, over a prolonged period, no damn good and constitutes as much of a threat to the the safety of the US (and thee world) as Trump does. Meanwhile, the most recent act of destruction by Putin in Ukraine - the blowing up of the dam at Kakhovka - offers yet another reminder (as if we needed one) of what happens when horrific people and their backers hold the reins of political power. It’s not just that decency goes out the window but the very norms of truth and reason lose their grip and are replaced by a seemingly mad and motiveless malignancy. It’s the kind of madness that informed Hitler’s vision of the Third Reich, Stalin’s and Mao’s idea of Communism and other ghastly political visions and regimes. What are we meant to do in such circumstances? That question is not easily answered and that’s one of the more insidious outcomes of letting bad operators get an initial purchase in the political realm. They have a corrosive effect which is almost immediate - they leave us feeling clueless and defenceless. Eventually, they can even have the effect of making us give up. That’s a huge price to pay and it’s not clear what we have left if/when we do give up. What would we be giving up for? A quiet life? But of course the notion of “a quiet life” is one that not only doesn’t exist but doesn’t even make sense in such an inherently capricious, cruel and obnoxious world. Living in a society where one is not constantly having to look over one’s shoulder is not the natural state of humankind. There was nothing inevitable about the triumph of such achievements as the rule of law, civil liberties, a national health service, public libraries, representative democracy and there is nothing inevitable about their survival. These features of a free, just and civilised society emerged out of great struggles involving human agents who thought they were worth fighting for and even dying for. We have come to take them for granted and our culpable complacency has now left them in peril. It’s not clear to me that we have the imagination to consider what our lives and our relations with others would be like if we found ourselves living in a society without them. But as we observe the horrors taking place in Ukraine and the unblushing corruption of politics in the UK and the US, two countries which used to pride themselves in being beacons of freedom, we can’t say that we were taken by surprise.

2023: March 25: On a brief trip to Cambridge, England. The airport police are armed to the teeth as if expecting a full-blown military invasion to arrive via a commercial flight. But what struck me more this time is that UK airport police are now called Border Force. FFS!

2023: March 15: I am trying to get my head around AI with a particular focus on ChatGPT. I can’t help suspecting I may be an incurable Luddite since I keep arriving at the belief that it’s a mainly bad thing. I need to think about it more robustly.

2022: November 25: A book reviewer in The Guardian is impressed that Colm Toibin can recall the names of the various families who lived in his estate when he was growing up in Enniscorthy. He thinks it shows just how deeply rooted CT is in his birthplace. His observation prompted me to think about whether I could remember the people who lived in my neighourhood from when I was growing up. To my surprise I could remember virtually all their names quite easily and that’s quite a few families - easily above forty. And not only could I recall their names but my memory of them remains vivid. They were people I knew quite well for all sorts of reasons - I’d see them at mass every Sunday, annoy them by playing ‘ring and run’, rob their orchards, deliver their milk on the milk van, collect their donations towards the Dun Laoghaire Lifeguard or be friends (or enemies) with their children. I then thought about how much time I spent outdoors as a kid - a conservative estimate would be virtually all the hours god gave - except when we were sleeping and eating - including the winter months. I am only fifty four years of age but in that respect at least the world of my youth seems like a foreign country compared with that of my own children.

November 22: Started reading Matthew Hollis’ biography of Eliot’s ‘The Waste Land’. So far so excellent. Apart from being a biographer and poet, Matthew Hollis is a son of a distinguished (now deceased) philosopher, Martin Hollis, whose writings I enjoyed reading about twenty years ago. That also makes him the nephew of the notorious Roger Hollis, former Head of M15 who is also dead and who took to his grave bigger secrets than most mortals ever do. I have always been fascinated with the shadowy world of spies after watching Alec Guinness in the BBC version of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy and then making my way through Le Carre’s novels.

November 18: It is amusing watching Elon Musk singlehandedly destroying twitter for which he paid so much. Greek tragedy without all the profound stuff. He might also end up providing a ew answer to the question How do you become a millionaire? “First become a billionaire, then buy twitter and, hey presto, you’ve achieved your goal!”

November 15: John Banville says in a recent interview in The Guardian that The Singularities is his last novel of its kind i.e. an authentic Banville literary novel as distinct from his thrillers. The prospect of the next Banville novel has been one of the constants of my adult life so this will take some getting used to. Though I suspect that he won’t be able to help himself writing at least one more.

November 13: What a difference a week makes. This day last week we were being told of a red Trump wave obliterating the Democrats in the Mid-Terms - I had let myself be taken in by this ruling and erroneous narrative. Among other things, the results show yet again the utter emptiness of polls and their mythical power over the media.

September 30: Spent a few wonderful days in Seville. Had to work during the day but saw enough of the place and its people to want to go back and for a longer and more relaxed sejourn.

September 23: Hilary Mantel dead. Like David Cornwell, she was planning to move to Ireland in the wake of Brexit. Shall miss reading her often acerbic essays in the LRB.

June 12: It seems that Eliot’s The Waste Land and Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway are going to monopolise literary centenary celebrations. What about Philip Larkin being 100? Good old Phil isn’t even getting a mention.

April 24: Finished Colm Toíbín’s The Magician last night. It’s a wonderfully engaging version of Thomas Mann’s life and times and features a fascinating cast of characters made up mainly of his family. It also provides a peculiarly insightful account of the first half of the twentieth century - at least the part that occurred in Europe and to a lesser extent America - which witnessed one of the darkest times in human history. At first I found the closing chapter arbitrary and even facile but it’s growing on me. In any case, I am indebted to Toíbín’s work for sending me to Thomas Mann’s novels most of which I haven’t read.

April 22: One of the more undeniable aspects of the social world is how unconvincing so much of it is. Some of its more conspicuously implausible elements include; the brazen, suicidal insanity of late capitalism, the absence of any serious, concerted response to climate change and the humanly caused degradation of mother nature, the poverty of political leadership, the intellectual vapidness of the business model underpinning institutional education (especially third level), the ascendency of a corrosive scientism and virtually everything published on social media. If I were to choose what I consider are among the more enduringly convincing (and appealing) features of human life they would include the delights of literature and philosophy, kindness, sexual desire, spontaneity, being truthful, comedy, friendship, a solitary coastal walk on a blustery winter’s day, human complexity, cheese and honey and a glass of wine, the heat of the sun on my back after a swim in the ocean, eavesdropping on a conversation in a café, listening to Bill Evans, being at a U2 concert with my wife, the miracle of seeing one’s kids being in the world, a pint of Guinness in a Dublin pub in the company of amusing friends, cooking dinner on Saturday evening over a nice bottle of Pinot Noir . . .

March 2: It might be time to balance or counter-balance the increasingly pervasive view that Putin has lost his strategic nous and basic sanity and entertain the possibility that things are going roughly as he planned. That isn’t to say that he has not lost his marbles but merely to consider other possibilities and not allow ourselves be blindsighted. He wouldn’t be the first person who wanted the enemy to think he was mad since that perception gives him other options.

March 1: Nearly a week into the Russian or rather Putin-led invasion of Ukraine. The horror of what’s happening gets worse day by day, night by night. The risk of escalation into a broader conflagration is likely to rise the closer the Russian army gets to overwhelming Kyiv and the more intense and deadly the conflict becomes. Surely a time for cool heads and a redoubling of meaningful diplomatic efforts. It seems Putin must be given a way out of the corner he has placed himself in - if indeed he has - not because he’s owed a favour (perish that thought) but on the purely pragmatic level that a rat in a corner that’s armed with nuclear warheads must be given a viable exit strategy for everyone’s sake.

February 22: So it looks like war is inevitable. What will happen next? Will it spread? What’s Putin up to? How will Europe respond when the fighting starts? Will the Russian army flatten Kiev? Will there be a huge exodus of Ukrainians to Europe? Will Ukraine hold out and for how long? What will Biden do? Will China intervene? Were these the kinds of questions people asked in 1939? And I wonder does Boris Johnson secretly (and not so secretly) regard this crisis as a godsend, the ultimate distraction at exactly he right time. No doubt he is preparing Churchillian, ‘our finest hour’ speeches as I type. His abrupt departure from the House of Commons when asked by a Labour MP to correct his earlier statement about the Russian oligarch Abramovich is on the sanctions list was both typical and telling.

February 11: It’s fifty years since Lionel Trilling published his masterpiece Sincerity and Authenticity.

February 7: The front page of the latest issue of Private Eye is another bullseye. Of course PE has been highlighting corruption within the highest levels of the Tory party for years through robust investigative journalism. The magazine’s existence is a happy reminder that the little englanders haven’t destroyed everything of genuine value (yet) in their benighted country.

February 6: Up until Thursday of last week I had suspected that the philosopher Thomas Nagel had stopped writing philosophy. But then to my my delight I saw the London Review of Books had published his review of two books on notable female philosophers of the last century. The review shows no diminution in his clarity and precision of expression or the originality and acuteness of his judgment. He is one of the undeniably great philosophers of the last fifty years. And his philosophical primer, What does it all mean? remains the best introduction to philosophy by a country mile.

January 23: I can’t help but feel that the decline in the book review pages of the Sunday Times, Observer and Sunday Telegraph and indeed our own Irish Times is telling in more ways than one. There was a time when what book reviewers said in these papers would inform part of the national conversation. The possibility of having a serious and sustained discussion about the books being reviewed in these papers today is vanishingly small. Does this matter? I think it does. Many of the books I read as a young man were prompted by reading the reviews of Frank Kermode, John Bayley, Martin Amis, John Banville, John Carey, Eileen Battersby, Clive James, James Wood and so on. Where do young people go now for informed recommendations about literature. The Guardian or The Financial Times? Possibly but even their book review pages are shadows of their former selves. There are of course such periodicals as the London Review of Books, the New York Review of Books but these publications don’t have anything like the reach of the broadsheets. No doubt, the decline of print journalism is a factor but it doesn’t explain everything. There is something deeper going on, a sort of pervasive malaise which has all but eliminated intellectual and literary discussion as a public good. Part of me, a big part, hopes my negative diagnosis is wrong, but I fear not.

On a happier note, I discovered the work of Edna O’Brien in recent weeks. What an wonderful, if belated, discovery! I am taking my time through her selection of short stories The Love Object. It’s not unlike reading Joyce’s Dubliners for the first time. You are in the presence of a writer who is infinitely gifted and assured and who can tell you more about human nature in a sentence than most writers can achieve in several tomes.

January 19: A few weeks ago I interviewed two distinguished Canadians on my series Talking to Thinkers. The first was with Cheryl Misak who is a philosopher and the author of a recent biography of Frank Ramsey. Ramsey was a Cambridge polymath and genius who achieved more in his brief time here (he died in 1930 at the age of 27) than most geniuses would accomplish in ten lifetimes. Misak ends her book by quoting the following memorable passage from one of Ramsey’s papers:

‘In time the world will cool and everything will die; but that is a long time off still, and its present value at compound discount is almost nothing. Nor is the present less valuable because the future will be blank. Humanity, which fills the foreground of my picture, I find interesting and on the whole admirable. I find, just now at least, the world a pleasant and exciting place. You may find it depressing; I am sorry for you, and you despise me … On the other hand, I pity you with reason, because it is pleasanter to be thrilled than to be depressed, and not merely pleasanter but better for all one’s activities.’

My other guest was the writer, historian, professor and politician, Michael Ignatieff. Ignatieff, who is now based in Vienna where he teaches history at the Central European University, has lived a highly varied and versatile life. His latest book, On Consolation, ends by quoting another remarkable piece of writing; Czeslaw Milosz’s poem ‘Gift’:

A day so happy.
Fog lifted early, I worked in the garden.
Hummingbirds were stopping over honeysuckle flowers.
There was no thing on earth I wanted to possess.
I knew no one worth my envying him.
Whatever evil I had suffered, I forgot.
To think that once I was the same man did not embarrass me.
In my body I felt no pain.
When straightening up, I saw the blue sea and sails.

2022, January 18: After a prolonged interval I return to my diary. Rather depressingly, many of the man-made woes of the world continue to persist with even more drastic intensity and pervasiveness. As many predicted, COP26 became COPOUT26, what’s left of English democracy has dwindled even more (indeed one of the more risible claims put forward unironically by a host of pundits is that their disastrous PM’s insensitivity towards the Queen in the aftermath of her husband’s death is the clincher to get rid of the country’s elected leader), the United States of America remains among the most conspicuous oxymorons on earth, Russia looks poised to invade Ukraine while Europe looks on impotently and cluelessly like a rabbit caught in the headlights and so on and so forth. Hey ho!

Speaking of rabbits, Sue Gray will need to produce one from her independent report so that her boss can somehow escape his latest self-inflicted scandal. This may well involve reinventing the English language - something BJ, his cronies and much of the gutter media have been working hard at for so long - so that a boozy garden party really means an informal office meeting, limiting contact to one person is essentially the same as socialising with a bunch of mates, and lying to parliament amounts to little more than an understandable and entirely forgivable transgression. Oh yeah, and obeying the rules really amounts to licence to do anything you fucking want. It’s not exactly a massive leap to Big Ben striking thirteen sometime soon. Welcome to the dystopian world of endless bullshit, shameless lies and alternative facts.

What the so-called eighteenth-century Enlightenment Project never envisaged was that once the human race managed to free itself from the darkness of oppression and superstition and gain access to such things as truth, knowledge and political equality, everything would fit into place. Much of the optimism of this largely noble endeavour proved groundless and nowhere more so than in its belief that people, including those who exercise power, would respect the truth and its implications. One of modernity’s many cruel ironies is that just at the moment we have produced vital insights that are easily understandable and universally accessible, we’ve ignored them, opting instead for the fatal opium of unreason.

2021, February 25: I submitted the following letter to the New York Review of Books shortly after reading an article by Pankaj Mishra in its November issue. The NYRB letters editor never replied and the letter itself has not been published.

‘There is much to admire in Pankaj Mishra’s essay ‘Grand Illusions’ [NYR November 19]. But when Mishra discusses Isaiah Berlin, things go spectacularly wrong. He claims that ‘Berlin’s own advocacy of liberalism ignored its tormented history, and he barely acknowledged any non-Western intellectual and political traditions’ and then adds ‘Berlin seemed to have assumed, like Mill before him, that only the liberty of the white male mattered.’ The first assertion is straightforwardly false and the second unmildly scandalous. Not only did Berlin not make such a callous assumption, but he rejected all forms of cruelty and injustice throughout his long and exemplary life. Moreover, his own ideas continue to be a reliable beacon for all those who affirm the humane and undogmatic values of truth, freedom and decency. 

Rather than comment any further on Mishra’s distinctly ungrand delusions about Berlin, I shall leave readers with Berlin’s own words from a lecture he delivered in New Delhi on 13 November 1961, at a conference held to mark the centenary of Rabindranath Tagore’s birth:

‘He [Tagore] seems to me, during his long and marvellously fruitful life, absorbed in concerns more creative than social or political activity, to have aimed to make only what was beautiful, and to say only what was true. This entailed self-discipline, and exceptional patience and integrity.  In setting down his social and cultural and above all educational ideas, he tried to tell the complex truth without over-simplification, and to that extent was perhaps listened to the less. There is a remarkable saying by the American philosopher C. I. Lewis which I have always treasured. He said there is no a priori reason for thinking that, when we discover the truth, it will prove interesting. Nevertheless it is surely better for words to be true than interesting. I can understand well that a country, and especially a great country with a rich past, and perhaps even a richer future, can justly feel proud of one of the rarest of all gifts of nature, a poet of genius, who, even in moments of acute crisis, when he spoke to and for his countrymen, and they craved not for mere reason, but for signs and miracles, did not yield; but unswervingly told them only what he saw, only the truth.’*

Johnny Lyons,

Dublin, Ireland 

*The above passage concludes Isaiah Berlin’s essay ‘Rabindranath Tagore and Nationality’, published in his The Sense of Reality (2nd. ed., 2019, Princeton University Press), 337. Tagore is one of the figures to whom Mishra compares Berlin unfavourably.

January 13: A friend urged me to watch Arnold Schwarzenegger’s message to America. It’s powerful stuff. I wonder if it is also a sign that Arnie may run for POTUS in 2024. It reminded me of Chaplin’s great speech which has lost none of its power. Both speeches could do without the distracting and non-value-adding background music.

January 10: Further reflections on America

Firstly, below is a link to one of the more interesting and timely op. ed. pieces which appeared in yesterday’s New York Times by the Yale historian Timothy Snyder, a former student of Isaiah Berlin:

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/09/magazine/trump-coup.html
Snyder’s distinction between gamers and breakers is conceptually helpful as a way of making sense of the current state of the GOP and its supporters and his emphasis on the importance of history can never be overdone. One thing in particular occurred to me after reading it:

The people who read the NYT are likely to agree with all or most of what it says. While there is an obvious and not unimportant value deriving from fellow democrats and liberals being strengthened and further illuminated in their convictions by such articles, the bigger challenge is how might his messages reach beyond the choir. And, more importantly, how would you begin to position Snyder’s analysis in a way that might actually prompt a genuine and productive dialogue with people of very different and opposing viewpoints. That seems to me the most difficult and urgent challenge. We have lost even a minimal sense of a shared ethical reality, what the thinker Isaiah Berlin referred to as ‘the human horizon’, in which certain basic normative facts are acknowledged and respected, albeit to varying degrees, by a critical mass of people. Examples of such normative facts might include the idea that it’s wrong to torture people for fun, that Hitler was evil, that truth is better than deception, compassion preferable to cruelty, and toleration more desirable that violence.

These shared moral facts become more contestable the more normatively loaded or thick they are. However, broadly speaking, most people most of the time have agreed to accept such evaluative facts and live by them. This area of agreement is what we might call the sphere of overlapping consensus. In the last few years that consensus has come under huge pressure in America (and several other liberal democracies). Not only have we lost sight of what we complacently regarded secure and sacrosanct ethical and political norms but we have also witnessed the proliferation of ideas that undermine the very coherence and possibility of such norms: within the first week of the Trump administration we were told about ‘alternative facts’ which was quickly followed by assertions that official facts are the invention of establishment elites and mere experts. The problem with this sinister and destructive nonsense is that it contains just enough plausibility to be swallowed by people who are vulnerable to believing it. Moreover, deconstructing half truths or quarter truths that parade as whole truths takes time and effort and that is not something our age of instant messaging and vastly diminished attention spans encourages.

So there is a combination of powerful factors - I have touched on only some - that hinder the liklehood of an ethically-based consensus regaining a foothold. Of course, if such a consensus were to happen it would not bring about the restoration of the previous one that many liberal democrats fondly thought was a permanent feature of late modernity - recall the grand, self-congratulatory announcements about ‘the end of history’ and ‘the triumph of the liberal capitalist dispensation’ in the wake of the fall of communism in 1989. If it’s meaningful and robust, it will necessarily be different and, no doubt, profoundly so. One thing is for certain - the liberal/conservative paradigm is no longer fit for purpose as it stands. We need to replace the dialogue of the mutually deaf and blinkered with something that is realistic and undogmatic about the radical plurality of irreducibly different and conflicting ways of life and opinions and then work out a way forward that makes room for difference without losing our increasingly fragile and threatened sense of humanity and civilised life.

January 7: Some reflections on yesterday’s events in Washington:

While it must have been truly frightening for the people in the Capitol, it was clear to anyone watching the coverage that this was not a coup in any real sense (no signs of any serious firepower or ingenious military mind at work on the footage I was watching - more like an unseemly riotous carnival of about a few hundred violent dunces and a couple of thousand less violent but equally deranged ones who fancied a day out in the capital and all overseen by a mainly passive and strangely underwhelming police force) even if it did end in the the death of five people. Yet the American mainstream media created, almost instantly, a ruling narrative that Washington and by extension the country had successfully overcome a genuine coup rather than a riotous mob! Phew!!!

The undeniably shocking scenes in Washington revealed yet again that the news media in the US (and many other countries) are pathologically hooked on spinning hyperbole and myths. While declaring their commitment to the sacredness of the truth they constantly undermine it with their relentless exaggeration. Their overwrought reaction might be more defensible if it was used more discriminately as a way of generating justified outrage regarding Trump’s insurrectionary conduct. But they diminish what’s left of their credibility by their chronic addiction to histrionics and the cult of the charismatic, egocentric news anchor. Moreover, all the talk by politicians and commentators about invoking impeachment and the Twenty-fifth Amendment had an unmistakable whiff of implausibility in the context of the deplorable record of the GOP during the last four years. If there is a way of prosecuting Trump and his political cronies for incitement to insurrection and/or sedition then they should pursue it as ruthlessly and quickly as possible but the time for the politics of symbolism unsupported by real, consequential sanctions is over. The gap between words and deeds is unavoidable but there is no reason to widen it unnecessarily and push things beyond break point. The more that words fall short of reality the more they lose their purpose and power. Moreover, linguistic carelessness plays into the hands of corrupt and nefarious forces by lending credence to the idea that words can mean whatever we want them to mean. The media would do well to take note of Orwell’s lesson that political commentary becomes far more powerful if it describes what’s happening as precisely, calmly and dispassionately as possible. As the American news anchor Edward R. Morrow (1908-65) remarked:

“To be persuasive, We must be believable,
To be believable, We must be credible,
To be credible, We must be truthful.”

If someone had told me this time last year that Biden would defeat Trump and that the Democrats would gain majority control of both houses of Congress I would have been massively relieved. After all, at the start of 2020, it seemed that Trump would secure a second term. Think how much darker the world would be if he had been re-elected and the Senate remained in the hands of a supine, nihilist yet highly effective GOP. The lights would most likely have gone out for good. America lives to fight another day: Certa bonum certamen . We have yet to see how irredeemable or not the situation is and whether the US can come back from the brink.

The overriding priority for the Democrats will be to retain the presidency and, if possible, both houses in the mid-terms. Biden may be too old to run so will Harris be electable as POTUS and does the Democratic Party take the risk? That’s a massive call. A black woman President would be significant in all sorts of positive ways but how likely is it that a majority of Americans would vote that way in four years’ time? I am sceptical. After all, over 74 million of them voted in favour of a proven fascist, racist, misogynist, self-aggrandising criminal to be President and Commander-in-Chief of their country for another four years. And I suspect he would have attracted a lot more votes if he hadn’t mismanaged the the pandemic as in competently and callously as he has. Notwithstanding the nature and scale of the human tragedy of Covid-19 in the US, the pandemic was a political godsend for the Democrats. They will need to get uncharacteristically disciplined and ruthless in seeking to restore what’s left of American democracy, the constitution and the rule of law while addressing the country’s deep and seemingly unbridgeable divisions. They and the people who voted for them in November were what kept America from entering a deathly spiral descent into fascist dictatorial rule. That danger remains a real and present one.

January 3: Just watched Boris Johnson on Andrew Marr on Sunday. Johnson is a bullshitter’s bullshitter. The essence of bullshitting is not so much lying as not giving a damn that you are lying. However, now that Brexit’s ‘done’ and even BJ can’t repeatedly blame the EU for everything that’s wrong with Britain or little england, his shortcomings as a politician (and a human being) are more naked than ever. It’s not just that he obfuscates and dissembles with unabashed abandon but that he is so mind-numbingly boring. He doesn’t even bother to get his facts wrong. He operates in a fact-free zone yapping on ad nauseum about the need to ‘think global and big’ and ‘grasp all the huge opportunities’. Scratch the surface of his tinsel charm and all you find is more tinsel. The interview confirmed just how pointless human interaction becomes when a concern for truth is entirely absent. Marr’s tenacity, especially in the second half of the interview, succeeded in showing the deliberate vacuousness and underlying nihilism of BJ more glaringly than usual. I tend to get annoyed with interviewers who ritually interrupt politicians before they have finished their first sentence but, in BJ’s case, you never want him to go uninterrupted past the first syllable of his ‘answer’.

January 2, 2021: I spent most of my late evenings during Christmas rereading Seamus Heaney's Stepping Stones, his series of dialogues with Dennis O'Driscoll - what an impressively knowledgeable, responsive and unvain interlocutor O’Driscoll was! They renewed my soul and sanity. Heaney's facility with language is astounding, even at his most casual and colloquial. He was incapable of speaking a dull word or having a dull idea. He remains a great antidote to cant. Alan Bennett’s 2020 Diary was much better than it’s been for a while but not a patch on the glory years of the 1980s & 90s.

December 19: Almost a week has elapsed since I heard the news of David Cornwell’s death. I imagine that I am like many people who are sad about his passing. It’s not just that there will be no more le Carré novels but that a person who was a consistently eloquent and arresting voice of sanity and moral decency has left the world’s stage. I have spent most evenings consuming the appreciations of him in the newspapers and on TV but the need to return to the inimitable and familiar company of his own words proved irresistible. Rereading The Pigeon Tunnel remains as engrossing as I remember it the first time round: among its many virtues is confirmation that it’s possible to be interesting and truthful at the same time.

November 28: Now that Trump is soon to go, I am switching my political focus to the other conspicuous aberration that is the current British Prime Minister and the dire situation the UK finds itself in. This led me to finally read Sir Ivan Rogers' unquietly devastating 9 Lessons in Brexit. It articulates the mess that is Brexit in a clear, precise and authoritative style one expects of a former top Whitehall mandarin. And things have deteriorated much further since Rogers’ bleak insider broadside was published last year. One fears the worst for the country. Covid-19 hasn't helped ‘preparations’ but even without the baleful impact of the pandemic Brexit is a complete and irredeemable dog's dinner all by itself. And then to think that the worst PM and cabinet in recorded history is at the helm is truly frightening: one suspects that Spitting Image is providing a distinctly polite account of what’s really going on in No. 10. Even a highly competent, imaginative and principled PM and government would find themselves overwhelmed by the challenges that are about to intensify in a multiplicity of direct and unpredictable ways. Alarmist? I don't think so. The only good bad news that Rogers has to offer is that the Brexit debate, which has been cloaked in crazy and criminally misleading rhetoric from the start, will finally cease once the beast itself is let free to become the new and ruling actuality on January 1. There is nothing like the unmediated thud of reality to expose the bullshit and lies that have dominated British politics and its mainly poisonous media for the last five years. It’s hard to think the unfunny clown that is Boris Johnson surviving beyond Easter in the chaos that is most likely to engulf the country. But unlike BJ, they can’t vote Brexit out of office and restore the status quo ante.

November 26: I had the good fortune to be asked to contribute to a creative writing project that involved each participant composing a letter in the voice of one fictional character to another. The characters could not be from the same novel and they could be from different times and places. Each of us was given a letter from the alphabet and we were required to choose figures whose first or last name began with the letter we were assigned, e.g. Clarissa Dalloway and Connell Waldron. This kind of writing is well outside my comfort zone but it felt like an opportunity that was too good to miss. Click here to view the results of Dear 26.

November 7: Phew!

October 14: Henry Hardy gave the Liberal International Annual Isaiah Berlin Lecture today which was broadcast live from London. Hardy’s lecture was a typically informed and engaging talk which demonstrated his gift for combining precision and clarity of thought with eloquence of expression. I was initially puzzled by the title of the lecture, ‘The Ten Commandments of Isaiah Berlin’, as it’s hard to imagine a less dogmatically moralistic thinker than Berlin. But Hardy succeeded in showing how the trope of the Decalogue can be applied to Berlin’s thought in a non-paradoxical and illuminating way. This was expressed particularly well by the inclusion of Berlin’s tenth commandment which reads: ‘Thou shalt always think for thyself: Taking this commandment at its word, I say no more about it.’ Echoes of Kant’s (and originally Horace’s) sentiment ‘Sapere aude’ comes to mind, the counsel of a philosopher who coined one of Berlin’s favourite lines: ‘Out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made.’ The lecture was followed by an informal discussion about Berlin’s personality and ideas between John, Lord Alderdice, a former President of Liberal International, and Hardy. The only regrettable aspect of the occasion was that, as a result of some technical hitch, we didn’t get to hear the clip of Berlin speaking at the end of Hardy’s lecture.

October 10: I have been reading Tacitus’s The Annals to help me make sense of what’s happening in the US. The parallels between the end of the Roman Empire and the current state of American political life are both gripping and disturbing. The main difference between then and now is the absence of a witness of the peerless objectivity and power of Tacitus. If you don’t believe me just read him and see for yourself. The Annals have led me to Tacitus’s other works, including Agricola and Germany. It is in the former where his most memorable line occurs, made all the more immortal by having an enemy of Rome utter it: Ubi solitudinem faciunt pacem appellant (Where they make a desert, they call it peace). In less than ten words Tacitus captures the corrupt essence of absolute power. The nihilism of brute, overwhelming force reveals its most naked and chilling side when it stretches the ordinary meaning of language to such an extent that words become empty, lifeless shells.

September 20: Yesterday I asked a few acquaintances who happen to live in America what they think will happen in November. Their views varied a bit but they tended to converge on the idea that though things will undoubtedly get very ugly, Biden will win by a large majority and there will end up being a smooth transition of power as always in January. Their shared sense of sanguinity got me thinking of some scenarios. Not sure if I should file them under Conspiracy Theories, Politics & Current Affairs, Political Thriller, Fairy Tales/Children Stories or Science Fiction and which scenarios belong to which genres; my initial guess is that Scenario 1 belongs squarely in the Fairy Tale section, Scenario 2 probably in Current Affairs, Scenario 3 in Political Thriller/Counterfactual History and Scenario 4 in Conspiracy Theory. Scenario 2 seems the most likely to occur of the conceivable options but it may suffer from overly optimistic assumptions. My general impression is that even the more farfetched scenarios are less practically inconceivable than they were four years ago which says something. There is a sense that the US crossed the Rubicon when it voted Trump as POTUS in 2016 and that there is no way back. This isn’t to say of course that all was rosy in the garden before Trump - far from it - the so-called American dream looks like a sick joke for too many of its people. But it’s difficult to see how a restoration of the status quo ante is achievable and, consequently, it’s likely that something radically new is will emerge. What form that new reality takes is more unclear than perhaps at any time since its civil war and the darkest days of the 1960s. One thing seems certain though: whatever road America decides to take, it won’t be smooth.

Scenario One: It isn't the cleanest presidential election in American history but it is one of the most decisive victories for the Democrats. Biden wins by a huge majority and the Republican seats in the Senate and House of Representatives reach their lowest numbers in US history. There is a smoothish transition of power from Trump to Biden in January but Trump refuses to welcome the Bidens into the White House. He leaves through the back door leaving his wife Melania behind. He tries to escape America but all his efforts prove unsuccessful. He is eventually tried and prosecuted for hundreds of crimes before the end of 2021. He is sentenced to spend the rest of his life in a Federal prison in Florida. 2021 is an extremely difficult year for America - the country remains highly polarised and riots break out regularly between die-hard Trump supporters and the police force and occasionally the army. For the first twelve months of his presidency Biden's biggest worry is being assassinated. However, 2022 sees the beginning of a new dawn for America - the country begins to rediscover its unity, the Supreme Court has thirteen justices (7 nominated by the Democrats and 6 by the Republicans). the Republican Party increasingly dwindles in importance and a new party called The Greens becomes the second biggest party in America. 

Scenario Two: After a very ugly presidential race in which Trump tries all sorts of crazy tricks including delegitimising the electoral process and urging the true, patriotic members of his country not to accept the fraudulent election result. However, Biden is eventually announced as the clear winner by the middle of November and his party regain control of both Houses. The months in-between mid November and mid-January are highly tense and polarised with riots occurring in various parts of the country and a series of increasingly bizarre happenings, mainly emanating from the White House but among certain GOP senators too who failed to get re-elected. Eventually there is a reluctant if effective transfer of power from the sitting president in January who is next spotted in a Moscow nightclub in early February snorting cocaine in the company of his son and three Russian hookers. The Trumps and Mitch McConnell are believed to be under the protection of Putin and living somewhere in Moscow. US imposes diplomatic pressures and sanctions on Russia until it gives up Trump and McConnell who both stand accused of the most serious high crimes and misdemeanors while the CIA work on a secret mission to extract Trump and McConnell from their Russian hideouts using SAC. Meanwhile, the US remains a deeply divided nation which is forced to face all sorts of major and unprecedented challenges to regain a semblance of societal stability and hope and reason and moderation in politics.

Scenario Three: Trump manages to convince his base that the upcoming election is a fraud and that no right-thinking American patriot should vote in such an election. Dejoy has been much more successful that had been thought in carrying out the destruction of mail-voting machines with the result that postal service's capacity is massively compromised and undermined for the upcoming election. Trump's base submit their mail votes but also try to vote on the day of the election causing chaos and inciting violence across the country. However, once it becomes clear that Trump has lost or will lose his office, he announces the election is null and void and he gets Mitch McConnell to publicly endorse his assessment of the situation (not clear yet if he will call the election a fraud the day before election day or on the day itself) . Anger turns into violence and riots spread nationwide. Martial law is introduced and the president calls himself Commander in Chief. There is a temporary stand-off with the military but after a night of purges in which he uses the resources of his friend Erik Prince (brother of Betsey Devos) and owner of Blackwater, during this period, Trump eventually gets enough of the generals on his side. The country's democratic institutions and norms are put on indefinite hold until peace and order are restored which never happens.  Chaos is the commander-in-chief's greatest asset. The country moves at an alarming speed from a stable democracy to a fully-fledged one party dictatorship. The only countries that don't end diplomatic relations with the newly named Dictatorship of the United States of America are Russia, North Korea, Turkey and Saudi Arabia.    

Scenario Four: Some background first. Putin has successfully taken over the most powerful country in the globe, a country that sees itself as the greatest democracy in the world. He never really thought he could pull it off. He managed to find a corrupt TV personality, blackmail him and then enter him, Donald Trump, as an unlikely Presidential candidate in the country's more corrupt and hyper-conservative Republican Party. This was the first step in a ten to fifteen year strategy that had the possibility of seriously undermining the fragile unity and functioning of America. Then the unthinkable happened - his crazy, TV personality puppet managed to secure the presidential nomination of the GOP. This is literally too good to be true since Putin thought it would take many more years of blackmail, infiltrating the country's electoral process and propaganda through social media before he could stage an internally-based coup. He knew his puppet had lived a life of conspicuous corruption and sleaze and there was nothing he could do to stop this coming out in what is still in certain quarters a freeish press in America. So he invested all his agents' efforts in hacking the electoral system and maximising propaganda efforts to try to convince enough people that their country had betrayed them and that his puppet was the answer to all their problems via a racist, divisive slogan 'Make America Great Again'. Then the miracle of miracles happened - Trump ends up being elected president of the most powerful country in the world. This is great news of course but it brings a host of new problems since the strategy has achieved its ultimate goal at least fifteen years too early. Putin will now have to intensify the divide and rule playbook with greater intensity and speed than he would like, knowing that the first really big test will be in the massively inconvenient presidential election in four years time. And so we have reached the point close to D-Day. Putin knows if he can get Trump over the line then he can make him President for Life. He also knows that he is going to have to get Trump to do all sorts of crazy stuff like appoint DeJoy to head the postal service who then proceeds to order the destruction of the vote counting machines. He is also going to have to get his puppet to urge his countryman to break the law by submitting their ballots by mail and then voting in person on the day of the election. Putin his puppet won't win the election as the country is still too wedded to powerful Western ideologies and dangerous illusions like democracy, justice, the rule of law, the separation of powers and so forth. All he has to do is sow enough doubt about the election's integrity so he can make his defining move. Then comes the puppet's coup de gras; after a late night call with the Kremlin on either November 2 or 3, the next day he will announce the election is null and void. Anger turns into violence on a frightening scale across the country. This is of course both deliberate and desirable. Chaos helps the new, overriding and increasingly revolutionary agenda. Indeed chaos is Putin's and his puppet's best friend for the foreseeable future. The puppet introduces martial law and ditches the title of POTUS which has too many democratic associations and calls himself Commander-in-Chief.  The country's long-established democracy is put on permanent hold until 'peace and order' are restored but is then officially laid to rest in 2025 when it becomes a satellite state of the Russian Republic. Then one day during 2025 Trump and his family suddenly disappear without a trace. Shortly afterwards, the White House is flattened and erected in its place is a giant statue of Vladimir Putin. In the same year, Putin’s birthday replaces July 4 as the main public holiday. China declares war on Russia in early 2026.

• September 3: Last night I listened to some recordings of Sorry I haven't a clue and the following wonderfully witty Uxbridgisms featured: Prima Donna: Guy Richie's bachelor days; Widdle: the conundrum that is Jonathan Ross, Balloon: an inflatable Belgian, Sanctity: multi-breasted French woman; eyesore: carpentry tool made by Apple.

• August 22: One of the glories of Desert Island Discs is being introduced or, more often, reintroduced to music that you haven’t heard in ages. Last month I was listening to an episode of DID - can’t remember the guest - and the theme tune of the film Un homme et une femme played. It’s one of those tunes that I instantly recognised but never knew the name of. I ordered a DVD of the film and eventually got to watch it last night. It’s an enjoyable film on a number of levels, a fine example of the then fashionable la nouvelle vague genre. A particularly poignant scene in the movie includes a dog ecstatically playing and skipping on a beach which amplifies the joie de vivre of the human moment that immediately precedes it. Another clip from the film, which is entirely incidental, features a grocery shop that shows price tags for fruit and vegetables in French francs et centimes. Seeing these price tags brought me straight back to pre-euro Europe when each country had its own opaque and exotic currency. And then that world reasserted itself more broadly in my mind; of the romance of trains with discrete corridors and compartments, of half a year spent in Paris in 1991 when I became a dedicated flaneur in between working as a washer-upper in an terrible fast food restaurant called Flunch, of lunchtime walks to the nearby, irresistibly edgy Rue Saint Denis, of visits to one of the cafes in Gare St Lazare and imagining or occasionally actually travelling to a European city for a long weekend, of the permanent and pleasant scent of Gitanes cigarettes, of a long summer and autumn working alongside an East German emigre - whose girlfriend didn’t make it across the Iron Curtain following his own successful escape- on a assembly line in the gargantuan Damiler-Benz plant outside Stuttgart in 1986, of discovering the rustic, unspoilt beauty of the Greek islands and the pellucidness of its azure sea, of an exchange I did with a a Parisienne boy called Jean-Marc in 1983 and of days spent blithely roaming the streets of Paris, of an unforgettable week in Berlin in the early Spring of 1996, of a honeymoon spent in Rome and Positano when I felt like the luckiest man alive, of a family camping holiday in Frejus in 1975 when we discovered the heavenly taste of Nutella spread on a crusty baguette, of being with my father at a rugby match against a French team led by the ubiquitous blond bombshell Jean-Pierre Rives in Parce des Princes, of an extraordinarily serendipitous day in Monte Carlo in September 1990, of taking a six hour train journey from Munich to Cologne that hugs the Rhine and falling in love without saying a word to a woman who happened to be seated opposite me for most of the trip (I wonder what became of her). So many enduringly vivid memories of an innocent abroad on a continent that represented, and still represents, freedom and fascination to someone from of a relatively introverted and robustly unEuropean island.

• July 22: Trump managed to do what I thought was impossible - make me laugh, albeit unintentionally. During a typically unhinged and atrocious interview with Chris Wallace of Fox News last Sunday he bragged about passing an exam for people suspected of suffering from alzheimers (why Wallace didn’t ask Trump why he was advised to take the exam is beyond me even for someone on Fox). I hope Trump gives us something else to laugh about in November.

• July 21: Having observed (and initially participated in) the seemingly terminal battle being waged over Isaiah Berlin in the letters pages of the Times Literary Supplement in recent months, the whole episode has begun to take on the appearance of one of those stock western or war movies where the enemy in the form of either North American native Indians or members of the German Wehrmacht emerge endlessly and suicidally from a gigantic wigwam or garrison with the apparent aim of destroying the US cavalry or British army only to find themselves being instantly shot dead with seemingly effortless ease by the all action, no fuss hero, Captain Hardy. No doubt the intrepid Hardy is looking forward to the day when he can withdraw from the battlefield and return to a more peaceful and productive life. But one fears that unless or until the madness of war is called to an end he will feel duty-bound to defend the Berlinian citadel against further unnecessary and clueless attacks.

  June 28: Last week I had the pleasure of conversing with the thinker John Dunn via Zoom. John Dunn, a retired Cambridge don, is one of the most acute and distinguished political theorists of the last fifty years. You can count such thinkers in one hand. Most of the stuff written about politics by academics is either irrelevant or empty. Dunn’s work stands out from the prevailing dross by being historically informed, politically realistic and morally undeluded. His sense of history and realism informs his political morality and vice versa. What is the cash value of his contribution you might ask? Well, it centres as much on what he doesn’t say and what he does say. He doesn’t indulge in lazy, second-hand or formulaic thinking nor does he accept the various pieties and hypocricies that many of us all too easily swallow hook, line and sinker. His writings are characterised by a rigorous and informed scepticism, a diamond-like refusal to engage in cant or wishful thinking and a profound recognition of the inescapable contingency of human affairs. In short, he is a breath of fresh air. Anyone who wishes to make sense of politics could do far worse than consult his magisterial and entirely accessible The Cunning of Reason. The closing paragraph from his last book, Breaking Democracy’s Spell, gives a flavour of his consistently serious, urgent and responsibly hopeful message:

  ‘Could human beings do any better in the face of the chaos they have made together? The answer to that can only be yes. Will they do any better, and, above all, will they do better enough? Quite probably not. But that is not a conclusion that it makes any practical sense to anticipate. A species facing self-extermination, even at a relatively sedate pace, has reasons for altering its behaviour. But it will still be the species that chose to act in the ways that created that risk. How far can human beings learn? In the end they will find out.’

• June 10: The Times Literary Supplement has published a letter that Henry Hardy and myself submitted last week following the publication of Nikhil Krishnan’s poor reply to our previous letter about his inept review of our books. As I read his letter the image that came immediately to mind was of someone with a shovel digging an even deeper hole. Myself and Henry decided to write another letter with the aim of ensuring that Krishnan did not have the last erroneous word on the matter and, thankfully, the TLS published it in this week’s issue of the magazine:

  Nikhil Krishnan’s defence of his article on Isaiah Berlin (Letters, June 5) begins by graciously accepting correction on two salient points, but then backtracks. He misdescribes the first correction as merely “clarifying an important nuance”, and attempts to wriggle out of the second by implying that belief in the “domino” theory of the spread of Communism entails support for the Vietnam War. Of course it doesn’t. Nor does Berlin’s “admiration for some of the public figures who advocated it”: admiration and disagreement can and did coexist.

  The public figure Krishnan probably has principally in mind is McGeorge Bundy of the Ford Foundation, which endowed Wolfson College, Oxford, in 1966. Krishnan’s source, Christopher Hitchens – a notoriously unreliable controversialist – illustrates Berlin’s admiration for Bundy with quotations from one of Berlin’s letters. But, as a note to this letter in the relevant volume observes (Building, p278):

  ‘[Hitchens] implies that these quotations show that [Isaiah Berlin] supported Bundy’s views on Vietnam, without indicating that the passages from which the quotations are taken are entirely about the negotiations over the funding of Wolfson. As a writer claiming the moral high ground, Hitchens should have eschewed this intellectual sleight of hand. He could have argued his case without it, though he would have had difficulty with IB’s publicly stated opposition to the war.’

  Krishnan’s examples of “colleagues” (a term silently dropped in his letter) who have dismissed Berlin’s scholarship are a motley crew. Isaac Deutscher was a Marxist polemicist whom Berlin described as “the only man whose presence in the same academic community as myself I should find morally intolerable”; Tariq Ali is a journalist and political activist (“frivolous”, for Berlin) who has cast false personal aspersions on Berlin, also corrected in a note (Affirming, p59); David Bentley Hart’s essay contains just one reference to Berlin, ludicrously describing his book on J. G. Hamann as “a ghastly, feeble, and imbecile squib by one of the twentieth century’s most indefatigably fraudulent intellectuals, Isaiah Berlin”; Robert E. Norton’s article is more scholarly, but there is a rebuttal of many of his points by Steven Lestition in the same journal.

  There are of course plenty of grounds for serious criticism of Berlin’s writings. But Nikhil Krishnan’s selection of critics to invoke borders on muck-raking. Is this a clue to his unstated “view of the critic’s station and its duties”?

  Henry Hardy
  Wolfson College, Oxford

  Johnny Lyons
  Dublin

• May 27: After a glaringly incompetent review of my book et al. on Isaiah Berlin appeared a few weeks ago in the Times Literary Supplement, Henry Hardy and myself decided to submit a letter to the editor. The letter was published in this week’s issue of the magazine. I have no idea how many people read the TLS letters pages but I suspect not many. Anyway, the most annoying thing about the review was that it represented a missed opportunity to engage readers in ideas at a time when such occasions should be exploited to the full and not wasted on gratuitously snide and unblushingly ignorant commentary:

  “One should never reply to reviewers unless there is a blatant misstatement of fact.” Thus Isaiah Berlin to Henry Hardy in 1978, when Rebecca West wrote a silly, spiteful review of Berlin’s Russian Thinkers. Neither of us entirely agrees with this stricture, but let us try to practice what he preached.

  Less than half of Nikhil Krishnan’s elegantly written gossip column about Berlin (May 15) – allegedly a review of three books about his thought, two of them written by ourselves (separately) – is directly devoted to the books, which therefore get absurdly short and philosophically empty, if gratifyingly positive, shrift. In the remainder Krishnan conveys a somewhat uncomplimentary view of Berlin, partly by citing the negative opinions of others but not calling them out on error or misjudgement, thus allowing their views to stand unchallenged.

  One especially egregious canard, that Berlin supported the Vietnam War, occurs in a summary of an essay by Christopher Hitchens, but is left uncorrected. Berlin wrote the following in Authors Take Sides on Vietnam in 1967:

  I think it was probably a terrible mistake on the part of the Americans to have sent troops there in the first place. I wish the Vietnamese had originally been left to settle the issue by and for themselves; […] Vietnam seems to me to have called for genuine non-intervention. […] I cannot help finding myself far closer to those who wish the war stopped at any price than to their adversaries. If I had to choose between the two extremes, I have no doubt which I should choose.

  To “sniping colleagues” Krishnan attributes the barb, again undisputed, that Berlin was a charlatan (Berlin’s term for Jacques Derrida, Isaac Deutscher, Martin Heidegger and George Steiner, among others). If that is right, give us more charlatans, say we.

  In his own voice, Krishnan says that Berlin denied the truth of determinism. He did not. He argued only that it is incompatible with the assumption of free will deeply built into our thought and language.

  The man on the right of the photo in the online version is the musical impresario William Glock, not Gloch, though this error is not Nikhil Krishnan’s fault.

  In deference to Berlin’s principle we pass over the questions of tone and interpretation about which much more might be said.”

  Henry Hardy

  Wolfson College, Oxford

  Johnny Lyons

  Dublin, Ireland

• May 26: I was watching an interview with Gore Vidal last night on Youtube during which he tells the following anecdote about Charles de Gaulle and Harold MacMillan. After some big international meeting held in Paris, CDG invited HM back to his residence for dinner where they dined with CDG's wife. During the dinner HM asked her what she was looking forward to after all the hustle and bustle of political life was over. She replied in her thick French accent “A penis”. HM tried to respond delicately but clearly couldn't hide his amazement. CDG let the rather awkward moment linger longer than he should have before saying “She means ‘happiness’ !'“

• May 24: Tsar Boris Johnson is sticking by his own precious Rasputin. He is looking more and more Trumpian with each passing day. It’s increasingly hard to tell the difference between them. Perhaps BJ literally can’t function without Cummings. It’s pretty obvious he’s a lazy, chaotic and unserious person who no doubt depends on workaholics like Cummings to actually get stuff done while he plods along from one press briefing to the next spouting platitudes and lies and thinking his chummy, florid delivery redeems all. A complete bullshitter in power is bad enough at the best of times but to have one as PM during a crisis of the scale of Covid-19 is catastrophic. Bullshitter + Crisis = Disaster Area. He’s the last sort of person you would go to in a crisis and yet he is officially in charge of getting the UK out of the biggest one since WW2. God help the people of and in the UK. I wonder what BJ would have done if he was PM in May 1939. Perhaps escape to his Oxford pile and write a book about the heroics of Lord Nelson? Assemble Airfix models of Spitfires and Hurricanes? Visit one of the army training camps and have some jolly fun getting stuck on a zip line? Apply for the post of valet to Captain Mainwaring? The possibilities are virtually endless.

• May 4:  I’ve been browsing back issues of The Listener magazine the last few weeks. Apart from the pleasure of reading superb essays, talks, and reviews by informed and talented writers on a wide range of themes, the main thing that struck me about the magazine was its unapologetic elitism. I am, of course, referring to elitism in the Arnoldian sense of that term which implies an uncompromising defense of intellectual life combined with an urge to make ‘The best that has been thought and said’ available to anyone who happens to care about the life of the mind. The magazine was founded by the BBC in 1929. That same organisation made the criminal decision of closing it down in 1991. Its cessation begs the question of why such a magazine was allowed to slip away. These things don’t happen for no reason even if the reasons or causes may be opaque and disparate. I don’t think the story of why and how The Listener and, more broadly, the spirit of elitism have vanished is sufficiently understood. The corruption of public life and the media, the growth of nationalism (as distinct from patriotism), the corrosive relativism of most postmodernism, the unconfident mess of much of education, the professionalisation and marginalisation of intellectual life, the triumph of instrumental rationality that poisons virtually every aspect of public life, the related subordination of everything to the priorities of commercial necessity, including the now suicidal path of global capitalism, are no doubt all relevant but there are surely other causes at play too. The end of the Cold War seems to have been one of the factors but to what extent is unclear. The loss of the importance of truth is another and perhaps the most important, if unobvious, one. It’s a story yet to be told.

• March 18: The Times Literary Supplement reports that earlier this month Hilary Mantel discussed her new work, The Mirror and the Light, as part of Southbank Centre’s Spring Literature Season. When it came for audience questions, one person asked “Do you write better when happy or sad?”, to which Mantel replied “It’s better just to write. It doesn’t matter how bad it is … you can always write something. Even if you’re not pleased with your prose you will be pleased with yourself … Rather than experience a downward spiral of self-disgust … you can, through working, change your mood … You don’t wait for confidence to write. You build your confidence through writing.” That sounds both true and helpful.

• March 16: I have just watched a fascinating conversation on YouTube that took place last September between the American writer Richard Ford and John Banville. There are a number of things that make it engaging. One is that Ford asks Banville questions that most interviewers would be afraid or lack the imagination to raise. The result is that Ford prompts Banville to be more revealing than he normally is. Another notable feature of their conversation is the contrast that Banville draws between the old world (Europe) and the new one (America). I think this contrast can be overdone and usually descends into caricature but I also feel that that there is a germ of truth to it. I think Banville gets close to distilling its essence without actually getting there - unfortunately the conversation moves on to another topic before the matter receives the treatment it deserves.

  I myself think European culture combines intimidated awe with jadedness wheres American culture has an entirely un-European underivative, can-do attitude. I used to think that Europe is culturally superior to the U.S., that its acute self-consciousness redeemed its weariness whereas American optimism felt more jejeune than inspiring. But I'm not so sure anymore. There is a sense that America is more energetically faithful to Larkin's wonderful lines about beginning 'afresh, afresh' in a way that European artists won't or can't. This is one of the reasons why I think the conversation between Ford and Banville worked so well.  There was a genuine, and not frictionless, dialectic going on between them. Ford’s informal, deflationary, irreverent style juxtaposed with Banville’s comparatively austere, precise and circumspect one, but then there emerged a notable convergence or, at least, overlap between their ideas and attitudes too - their respective honesty, utter seriousness towards language, their shared antipathy to modish and constricting isms, their sense of vocation to the art, and their visible respect for each another and for what they are trying to do in their different ways. Their talk ended with Banville recalling a wonderful quote from John Updike that ‘my project is to give the ordinary its beautiful due.’

• 14 March: The ever worsening impact of coronavirus is not without its blessings, chief among which must surely be that it might precipitate the end of Trump as POTUS. Whatever about being completely incompetent and lying with impunity in ‘normal’ times, it becomes unsustainable in the context of a pandemic crisis. Good riddance!

  Another notable feature of the coronavirus outbreak is our response to it. Leaving aside the fact that national governments and their peoples have reacted in various, often conflicting, ways to Covid-19, what’s striking is that the world has actually reacted. This contrasts sharply with the lamentably underwhelming response of the world or rather of homo sapiens to the much more serious threat of global warming. Unlike Covid-19, global warming will most likely wipe out the human species and most non-human ones too. The fact that it may not literally do so today or tomorrow would appear to be the main explanation for our persistent and increasingly suicidal lack of serious action. For a while I had half-played with the thought that humanity had resigned itself, perhaps unconsciously, to its unhappy, self-induced fate but our response to Covid-19 has exposed that as false. We really are spectacularly confused and largely disastrous featherless bipeds. If we didn’t exist, nobody or nothing would invent us, except perhaps our own convenient, if unedifying, notion of God. Humanity’s unofficial motto has become fiat iniustitia, pereat mundus. Perhaps we really are nearing the end or, at least, its beginning. This perspective is, of course, a million miles away from the idea I dearly wish I could still indulge that the truth will out and goodness shall prevail.

• 13 March: A film I directed last summer about the life and times of Isaiah Berlin through the lens of his self-declared pedantic editor Henry Hardy is now published on the Films section of this website and will be posted to the Isaiah Berlin Online site shortly. I ended up making a long and short version of the filmed interview, Discovering Isaiah Berlin, as most people don’t have the time or inclination to watch more than an hour of such a thing.

• 8 March: Henry Hardy, Isaiah Berlin’s principal editor, and myself were Nigel Warburton’s guests at this month’s Philosophy in the Bookshop in Blackwell’s large and marvellous flagship store in Oxford. It was a full house and good fun. Nigel has a genuine gift for this kind of event - he asks good questions, lets the conversation flow naturally and keeps it real and interesting for the audience. You can view it by clicking here. Bernard Williams came up nearly as much as Isaiah Berlin which was fine with me as I regard Williams as very much in the Berlinian philosophical mould, albeit far more systematic that Berlin in his rejection of academic moral theory. During our talk Henry made the startling claim that as far as he could make out Berlin had ready none of Hamann even though he had written a book on his thought. Anyway, after the talk the three of us went to a pub for lunch where we discussed mainly Oxford-style philosophy and philosophers. I then joined my younger sister, who had come up from London for the event, for a chat over a couple of pints in The Bear, my favourite pub in Oxford. So as close to a perfect day as I could imagine. Little did I know that I was about to face the prospect of delayed and/or cancelled trains necessitating a high-speed taxi ride from Birmingham city centre to its airport and a panicked sprint to the Ryanair gate to just about make my flight home.

• 28 February: I noted the first review of my book on Berlin today: it’s published in The Critic.

• 26 February: I had been dipping into La Rochefoucauld last night which prompted to try my hand at a few aphorisms of my own:

  The history of philosophy is much less a series of footnotes to Plato and far more a succession of nails in his coffin

  There is more depth in the surface of human life than we can begin to fathom

• 23 February: One of the more distressing and alarming aspects of Brexit is that it has made so many of us so angry. Where before, most people could and usually did disagree about political and moral issues without jeopardising their relationships, Brexit has changed that. Politics has become deeply personal. Indeed, we increasingly feel that unless politics is personal it is, in some crucial way, inauthentic and unserious. Generally speaking, being angry is rarely a very good idea, especially for the person who is full of all the anger. Nor is registering the intensity of one’s feelings the only or even a particularly reliable barometer of the validity of one’s political preferences. Other things are important too, such as the acknowledgement that one’s own view of things may not be entirely and infallibly right, that compromise need not be regarded as a dirty word, and that basic standards of civility and decency in public life have, on the whole, served us well and should not be treated with contempt.

  I'd like to think that if/when the Brexit storm abates one of the lessons we might (re)learn is to cease relentlessly personalizing politics and to regain our sense of being more level-headed and open-minded, keeping a judicious distance from the more extreme and divisive positions that now dominate the battle lines - even political language has become militaristic - of the Brexit debate. Is this a poorly concealed defence of political apathy? No. Is it a plea for a return to some modicum of moderation? Undeniably. But it rests its defence of that political norm on the notion that the value of the messy, non-sexy middle ground does not lie primarily in privileging diffident and invariably liberal opinions about the big questions of the day, but rather in the recognition that nobody or no one side in a legitimate disagreement can claim to have a monopoly on wisdom or being morally right. It is also founded on the belief that preserving the centre ground may be the only feasible way we have of accommodating the latter yet increasingly precarious truth.

  Moreover, the quicker we see that the centre is not the preserve of some liberal elite the better. Rightly or wrongly, it would seem that the post-WWII heyday of liberal consensus has suffered rapid and, arguably, irreversible decline but that doesn’t mean we must lose sight of the more basic and indispensable norms of the separation of powers, the rule of law, and civil society as well as the underlying values of respect for truth, objectivity and justice. If we let these norms and values wither on the vine, there will be far more people upset and imperiled than a minority of wet and wistful liberals. There are, in other words, pragmatic and not just principled reasons for maintaining a tolerant, open and civil society. Have we reached a point where we are so historically ignorant and politically myopic that we have forgotten what happens when we allow our own personal biases undermine and, ultimately, prohibit the freedom of others to entertain their own, perhaps rival and incompatible, set of opinions? Are we really going to let politics become the new religion and outlaw those political views which are opposed to our own? And do we really need to be reminded of how more likely we run the risk of creating a world which is ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short’ if we follow such a willfully self-destructive and unnecessary path?

  Thomas Mann famously remarked that ‘tolerance is a crime when applied to evil’. Easier said than followed through, I hear you say. Clearly, many consider that the current situation has deteriorated to the extent that liberalism must finally show its teeth and fight intolerance with, well, intolerance. I’m not convinced that we have reached such a dire stage. But even if we were prepared to concede that liberalism is facing a major crisis, it’s by no means clear that its best form of defence is illiberal attack. Apart from the fact that such a tactic would be tactically risky and, arguably, premature, it would, more fundamentally, most likely end up being self-defeating. One of the chief strengths of modern liberal democracies is that they give truth room to breath. As long as we continue to place our trust in truth, liberal democracies tend to take care of themselves in their own piecemeal, inefficient and untidy way. The fatal threat to an open and tolerant society arises when its citizens stop caring about truth. And by truth I mean two things - a resistance to being lied to, especially by the powers that be, and a commitment to allowing the free market of ideas. So it’s truth with a small 't’ and without a definite article. For all we know, if our respect for truth persists then the day may come when truth outlives both liberalism and toleration. There are very few general truths that we can take from history but one of the more uncontroversial ones is that nothing, not even liberal toleration, lasts forever.

  But, for the time being, in the public domain tolerance remains very much the child of unavoidable and reasonable disagreement whereas certainty stands out as the father of moral dogmatism and political authoritarianism. Sadly, we are living in an age in which, to quote Yeats’s celebrated lines, ‘the best lack all conviction, and the worst are full of passionate intensity.’ One of the first steps in getting ourselves out of our poisonous and polarised mess, not merely in the UK but in other countries of the Western world, is to resist the temptation of regarding ourselves as the put-upon and enlightened ‘best’ and and the other side as the unhinged and deplorable ‘worst’. It’s not just that adopting a position of ‘them’ and ‘us’ is far too lazily and self-fulfillingly convenient, it’s also likely to be unfair, unhelpful and untrue.

• 20 February. Listened to one of the London Review of Books celebratory podcasts during the week - the LRB is marking its 40th anniversary this year. Its long-time editor, Mary-Kay Wilmers, talked about one of the magazine’s contributors, a musicologist and Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford by the name of Alan Tyson. As well as being a musicologist, Tyson was a practicing psychoanalyst and above the couch where his analysands lay was a sign saying ‘Least said, soonest mended’! I wonder if any of his analysands observed that an anagram of Alan Tyson is ‘no analyst’?

• 15 February, The result of our recent general election is raising all sorts of fascinating and challenging questions. It’s too early to tell if the outcome will redefine the political landscape or prove less significant and enduring than many seem to think. But if it ends up being more the former than the latter then all sorts of possibilities begin to declare themselves: our first female Taoiseach, the coarsening of political debate and even the inception of mob rule, a major redistribution of wealth, the beginning of the end of ‘civil war’ politics, a major step in Sinn Féin’s adjustment to mainstream constitutional democracy, a solution to the housing crisis, a far less business-friendly government, more intense and frequent demands for a united Ireland (the outcome of the referendum to change the irredentist claims of Articles 2 and 3 of the Irish Constitution by a majority of over 94% in 1998 seems to have been entirely lost or forgotten in certain quarters), increasingly unstable and fractious relations with the UK, an injection of new and radical thinking, closer or looser ties with Europe and the rest of the world. We live in interesting times but part of me - a large part - wishes that politics became comparatively boring again, whoever gets into power. And this isn’t because I necessarily want more of what we’ve had, much of which was strikingly unimaginative and almost flamboyantly unambitious. It’s more related to the sense that the greater the extent to which politics resembles entertainment the less likely we are to be concerned about what matters for the good of everyone in our society, especially the most vulnerable. Uninspiring things like toleration, the rule of law, compromise, the separation of powers between the executive, the legislature and the judiciary, basic decency and respect for others, haven’t ceased being important. The ever-present risk is that we take them for granted and only appreciate their value once they are seriously threatened or removed.

  This is, no doubt, starting to sound very humdrum and boring but that doesn’t make it less true or untrivial. Who said the truth must be fascinating? Most of the big problems that politics is concerned with are highly complex and frequently intractable. Such problems don’t lend themselves to the soundbite which nourishes the idea that we have the attention span of a goldfish. A surge of popular interest in politics may end up being a good thing in all sorts of ways but we needn’t fool ourselves into presuming it must be a good thing in advance of seeing some evidence. Nor need we blind ourselves to the very real possibility that it might just be the latest manifestation of the infantilisation of our minds by a multiplicity of disparate forces, several of which remain as opaque as they are ubiquitous.

• 1 February, It's now as good as official - the US is closer than ever to a tin pot dictatorship that still thinks of itself as 'the greatest democracy in the world.' The latter claim was always patently absurd, of course, but has now deteriorated to the level of a bad joke. Yet there is nothing risible about a US president who can literally do what he wants (and it's always a 'he' of course) at home and abroad. Once the legislature or, more specifically, its corrupt and supine GOP majority in the Senate, abandon the principle that power is accountable to the truth and to basic moral and legal norms, the game is up. As Congressman Adam Schiff eloquently and movingly said in his closing remarks of the Trump impeachment ‘trial’, “If right doesn’t matter, we are lost.”

  It also means that the current incumbent in the White House is now more likely to win a second term in office and then who knows what could happen next. Things we once felt were unthinkable could quite plausibly and suddenly become unstoppable. On what basis would one bet against the impossibility of a POTUS for Life by 2024? And would the odds of winning that wager be much lower than one on Trump being beaten in this year’s presidential election? The American people are increasingly finding themselves dependent on a miracle to get themselves out of the dangerous mess they’re in. And we all know the crucial shortcoming of miracles.  

  Presumptuous? An Overreaction? Possibly. It’s hard to tell how objective and fair-minded one is or can be in these strange and confusing times. It’s also hard to determine just how serious and irreversible or, alternatively, insignificant and temporary the situation may be and where things are likely to go from here. Leaving aside the fact that Trump and, in a different way, Brexit strike many of us as huge distractions in a world in which we are confronting the urgent and possibly insoluble threat of existential extinction due to human-generated climate change, are the US, and possibly the UK which exited the EU on the same day as the Republican-led Senate gave carte blanche to a self-professed ‘very stable genius’, set on a course that can only end in tears? Or will evidence-based common sense and moral decency eventually reassert themselves and a minimal level of sane moderation and bipartisanship return? The verdict of history may show that nothing is inevitable but surely certain developments become more likely than others as a result of a radically changed political landscape. World War 2 became far more likely when Hitler was appointed German Chancellor in January 1933 just as Gandhi’s rise to power made it more probable that India would gain independence via non-violent means. If one takes the view that the US and perhaps, to a lesser extent, the UK are on a catastrophic path then those who disagree with this diagnosis will tend to describe such catastrophists as deluded defenders of a complacent and self-serving status quo ante or extreme and possibly unhinged pessimists. They might add that we are simply observing democracy in healthy motion and that there’s nothing fundamentally to worry about. If, on the other hand, one takes the opposite view, catastrophists or clear-eyed realists (take your pick) will tend to dismiss the more benign diagnosis as dishonest or blind and, ultimately, complicit, consciously or not, in bringing about the demise of the separation of powers, the rule of law and our hard won civil liberties.

  In spite of having a generally hopeful disposition, I find myself increasingly siding with the less sanguine picture as the reigning zeitgeist favours populism over liberalism, dogmatism over scepticism, uniformity over diversity, brute power over respect for truth and justice. It’s not just that the pendulum has swung more towards the right than many of us might happen to like but that the normal zigzag of politics has been taken over by forces far more destabilising and destructive than liberal democracy can reasonably and effectively accommodate. The judiciary may be the last bulwark in both countries that will end up saving them or at least stemming the slide into the abyss: One might have reason to be more hopeful about the UK judiciary in such circumstances than the increasingly partisan US Supreme Court. But even then, one must concede that the authority and scope of judicial power is limited and, in many cases, circumventable.

  Given the disorientating and deeply polarised political circumstances in which we find ourselves, one might remain diffident about whether being pessimistic is tactically superior than taking a more optimistic, can-do attitude. I happen to find myself taking more inspiration from something along the lines of Samuel Beckett’s brave pessimism rather than Martin Luther King’s equally courageous brand of optimism. Either way, we need more and more humane and tolerant optimists as well as pessimists making their voice heard and their vote count. Pessimists can be as practically effective as optimists can be genuinely insightful. David Cornwell (John le Carré) reminds us of the relevance of May Sarton’s words for both freedom-loving pessimists and optimists in his speech given last month in Stockholm on receiving the Olof Palme prize: One must think like a hero to behave like a merely decent human being.

• Diary: Last week, a friend recommended Peter Medawar’s Pluto’s Republic. Medawar (1915-1987) was a distinguished scientist who won the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1960. But as well as being an eminent biologist he was that very rare bird, a wonderful stylist. Pluto’s Republic displays not only the author’s impressive breadth and depth of knowledge across a diverse range of topics but his mastery of English prose. Most grammar books end up acquiring layers of undisturbed dust for the obvious reason that they are deadly dull. I can’t think of a more lively and reliable guide to English grammar than Medawar’s crisp, clear and engaging essays; he demonstrates the rules and indeed indispensable value of English grammar by exemplifying them superlatively in his writings. In fact, the penny finally dropped this morning when I reflected on why my friend was so keen for me to read this beautifully written book. And, of course, it’s not that Medawar’s style is the only way of writing well but it does have the uncommon and priceless virtue of allowing the reader grasp precisely and concisely what he is saying, and especially when he is saying serious and significant things.

• Nigel Warburton will be talking to Henry Hardy and myself about Isaiah Berlin in on Saturday, 7 March at 11 a.m. in Blackwells Bookshop, Oxford. This event forms part of Blackwell’s Philosophy in the Bookshop free monthly series in which Nigel Warburton, author and public philosopher, hosts philosophical discussions with a variety of guests.

• News: The book launch of The Philosophy of Isaiah Berlin took place in Books Upstairs on D’Olier Street, Dublin on 23 January. John Banville, an enthusiast of Isaiah Berlin, was the celebratory host of the event which was attended by my family and friends. A lovely, enjoyable evening in one of Dublin’s finest independent bookstores.

• 25 January, 2020: The premiere of my film Discovering Isaiah Berlin was held in Corpus Christi College, Oxford last Friday, 17 January. The film was followed by a panel discussion, expertly hosted by Robert Cottrell and featuring Henry Hardy, Richard Lindley and myself. A very enjoyable and memorable evening with family, friends and guests in the most splendid and friendly of settings. Copies of my book The Philosophy of Isaiah Berlin along with the paperback edition of Henry Hardy's superb In Search of Isaiah Berlin: A Literary Adventure were also on sale at the event. See photos in Photos & Drawings section.

• Alan Bennett’s 2019 diaries were published in the LRB today, 26 December 2019. They are becoming increasingly bereft of their former acuity and winning wit. His 2019 entries are even more uneventful and boring than those included in his largely soporific 2018 diary. But he manages to come up with at least one alliterative beauty: Britain is now 'ruled by a gang rather than an government' seems about right, if slightly understated. The only other entry of interest concerned his predictably ambivalent feelings about the recently deceased Jonathan Miller.  ‘Thin gruel’ as a friend of mine remarked.

• 24 November, 2019: Clive James died today, 24 November 2019. His abiding fear was not of death but of being remembered for the wrong reasons. His dread was that his obituary headline would read ‘Japanese game show man dies’. He needn’t have worried. His poorly named book, Cultural Amnesia, is his most underrated and among the most under-appreciated books of this young century. Perhaps his death will prompt more readers to give it the attention it so obviously merits. Among my favourite CJ quotes are ‘All I can do is turn a phrase until it catches the light.’ and ‘Stop worrying, nobody gets out of this world alive.’ I’ll miss his unpretentious eloquence and humane wisdom.