The bottom line — when all else is said and done, and no matter where you might stand on the merits of this issue — is that a man has died.

Dr Jason Arday, I believe his qualifications still stand, resigned from his Professorship at the University of Cambridge this summer, and later lost his life.1 His decision was linked to sustained accusations regarding his credibility, scholarly integrity, and sporting achievements.

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Hundreds of articles, postings and comments about this issue have flooded the infosphere since mid-July: some good, some bad, many indifferent, and a few utterly scurrilous.2 I’ve read many of them, by no means all, from across the spectrum of credulousness. I should probably stop consuming them.

I have no particular insider knowledge of his case, and, beyond having studied or worked in institutions of Higher Education since the early 1990s, have no profound insights to offer. That said, I thought I should make a mark, incise a few scratches on the wall, be counted.

The ‘charges’

So far as I can ascertain, Dr Arday had committed no crime; he had not been found culpable of any misdemeanour,3 he had neither harmed nor threatened anyone (legal letters from Carter-Ruck to journalists from the Times Higher notwithstanding4), yet he is dead.

At the very minimum, this is a tragic outcome of what was seemingly a dispute over referencing and plagiarism, and whether he ‘deserved’ his professorship at Cambridge.5 It might also be the case that the imminant publications of his memoirs, Great and Unfortunate Things, could have been another trigger for the latest wave of accusations. (Which raises pertinent questions about the support he received from his publishers. )

Clearly, referencing errors were made in his work, both in his PhD and later articles; investigations were conducted, and these issues have been admitted to and addressed.6 Perhaps these inquiries were less than perfect, as was, possibly, some of Dr Arday’s work. Possibly these issues are endemic to the study of the sociology of education, or to his alma mater, which is one way of looking at it. Perhaps not. Nor are accusations of plagiarism in academia rare.

The referencing and citation systems Dr Arday used in his published articles are not ones I would replicate myself. I come from a different discipline, history, and take an alternate approach.7 I would say the same about the citations used by his main accuser, Dr Nathan Cofnas.8 And no, that’s not to make a comparative assessment about the merits of their respective work.

That said, these are the formats and style used in his discipline, whether I approve of them or not.

The ‘Crime’

None of this seems to have been his core wrongdoing; his ‘crime ’, at least for many in the commentariat, was his being a successful black academic who’d gained a high-profile position at a globally admired institution that they suggest he might not have ‘deserved’. This accusation is fundamentally different to questions of plagiarism or shoddy citations and has less to do with the evidence and more to do with the ideology and intentions of his accusers.

Hiring panels in academia can be ‘odd’, as anyone who’s sat on one will know.9 Why Cambridge hired Dr Arday as opposed to anyone else has not yet been fully revealed, and it seems moves are afoot to expose more.

Might there be issues here?

Yes.

Even if there were, did Dr Arday deserve to be hounded in such a way that contributed to his death?

No.

The bigger picture

However, there is far, far more going on behind these attacks on Dr Arday’s reputation and scholarship. British Higher Education is currently under sustained assault from numerous quarters; pressures which are political, financial, and ideological in nature. Departments are being axed, thousands of faculty are being laid off, while the very purpose of tertiary education is being questioned.10 So too there’s a long-standing assault on assumed ‘woke’ culture, affirmative action and the insidiousness of ‘left-wing’ domination of the academy. The last of which is perhaps the most serious, and well-funded threat; it’s certainly the one that worries me the most.

Dr Arday was a casualty of these processes. Whether the campaign against him was actually a coordinated and purposely targeted assault is currently unclear, but it is not beyond the realms of possibility.11

Dr Arday addressed these issues in April 2026, at the annual conference of the British Sociological Association:

I always think of how driven people are to engage in the absolute destruction of another person’s life on the basis of something they don’t agree with. Is that a reaction to a system that they feel has been unfair towards them? And maybe this is their way of lashing out or trying to create some sort of balance in terms of their own experiences?

[…]

Now, the instruments that are designed to protect academic integrity, designed to protect our wellbeing and our intellectual property, are weaponised under the guise of them. These people are brilliant, perversely brilliant. There are times when you look at what they’re doing and you say to yourself, ‘well done, well played, very good. You’ve caught me a thousand knots – how do I get myself out of this situation?’.”12

I suppose some might read these words and suggest “Well, he would say that, wouldn’t he,” but clearly the pressure was already building on him months before it was splashed over the internet.

Dr Arday was a target, whether or not he was targeted.

“Who breaks a butterfly upon a wheel?”

Cold War Steve, perhaps the best chronicler of broken, Brexit Blightly, posted one of his excellent montages on this very subject a few days ago, pictured above. The rogue’s gallery of faces on display might not be immediately recognisable to all, but they might be summed up as the ‘usual suspects’, at least in the UK.

It took me a moment or two to get the reference to the main image at the front of the picture, and to recall The Times editorial that I’m guessing informed it:

There are cases in which a single figure becomes the focus for public concern about some aspect of public morality. The Stephen Ward case, with its dubious evidence and questionable verdict, was one of them, and that verdict killed Stephen Ward. There are elements of the same emotions in the reactions to this case. If we are going to make any case a symbol of the conflict between the sound traditional values of Britain and the new hedonism, then we must be sure that the sound traditional values include those of tolerance and equity. It should be the particular quality of British justice to ensure that Mr. Jagger is treated exactly the same as anyone else, no better and no worse. There must remain a suspicion in this ease that Mr. Jagger received a more severe sentence than would have been thought proper for any purely anonymous young man.

William Rees‑Mogg, Editorial, The Times, 1 July 1967 13

Not that I am a fan of the late Rees-Mogg, or of his progeny, but his response to the arrest of Mr Mick Jagger for the possession of legally bought amphetamine raises a key question: Was Dr Arday treated fairly, irrespective of his colour, or class or gender?

I think not.

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For some reason, I keep watching Guy Ritchie films, and quite liking them.

I am not sure what that says about me or his work. But there it is.

The other night I came across yet another of his new releases, In the Grey, and ended up watching it all the way through. It was fine, perfectly digestible; it zipped along at a terrific pace, was well shot & blocked, and everyone was exceedingly well dressed. Moreover, all involved seemed to be enjoying themselves, not least the director.

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It wasn’t a great film, but it certainly wasn't the worst thing I’ve seen this year — that would have to be the overhyped, unscary and ‘flat-packed’ Backrooms. Nor the best; both Köln 75 and The President’s Cake are unmissable, IMHO.

Krankin’ out da kontent

A while ago I posted about two of Ritchie’s earlier efforts and his Stakhanovitian levels of output: his Indiana Jones rip-off ‘Hope springs Eternal’ (or something); and his camp Second World War romp about SOE, and butch chaps with beards. Much of the ensemble cast is recycled from these earlier efforts; Henry Cavill and Eiza González are staples, plus a couple of less talented siblings, Jake Gyllenhaal1 and Carlos Bardem (that’s a tad unfair, but still).

There’s no Jason Statham in this one, which is a shame as their Wrath of Man (2021) is really pretty good, so in lieu of that here’s a video of him dancing in his gold pants, well, just because…

González might well be one of the most talented actors of her generation, but you wouldn’t know that from her appearances in Ritchie films. She’s underused, and she’s even left out of some of the promotional material. González gets more lines in this one than usual, but still seems wasted.

There is a great scene where she makes a lovely-looking ‘stovetop negroni svegliato’ while talking about something else; I probably missed exactly what, because I was busy looking up what a stovetop negroni svegliato was. Anyway, she makes one with great panache.

It’s also quite noticeable that although she’s also an extremely attractive woman, none of the other characters in Ritchie’s movies ever seem attracted to her. This was taken to extremes in his earlier SOE flick, as I noted, and here she’s referred to as 'mother’ (I’ve no idea).

Of course, actors don’t have to play to stereotypes and women shouldn’t be objectified, but I can’t quite work out what her role in these films is supposed to be, apart from a glorified clotheshorse. Maybe Ritchie doesn’t know either.

As before, the real attraction on screen is between the lead male characters, Cavill and Gyllenhaal. They would have made a lovely couple, although yet again Ritchie misses a trick, especially given Gyllenhaal's earlier starring role in one of the greatest love stories ever committed to film.

I, for one, can only hope Ritchie eventually gets to grips with these subtexts, and makes a proper romance. Maybe he should remake Joe R. Lansdale’s Hap and Leonard series.

Anyhoo…

The ‘Plot’

So what’s it all about? Well, here’s the official spiel:

In The Grey follows a covert team of elite operatives who live in the global shadows, as comfortable wielding power and influence as they are automatic weapons and high explosives. When a ruthless despot steals a billion-dollar fortune, the team is sent to steal it back on what would be for anyone else a suicide mission. What begins as an impossible heist gets much worse, spiraling into an all-out war of strategy, deception and survival.2

Essentially González is a lawyer who recovers stolen money for another lawyer, Rosamund Pike, and then takes a cut. That’s essentially it, and yes, she does. Although she’s highly effective in courtrooms and gets all the bad guys' (Badem) assets impounded, González also employs a black ops krew led by Henry and Jake, named Sid and Bronco, who do a lot of murdering as they go along. And I mean a lot of murdering, like loads. This proves useful after González is double-crossed by Pike or someone else and then kidnapped. They release her, and murder lots of people.

Overall, the plot seems much the same as Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre, and it doesn’t really matter because it was all done well. It was nothing too complex, nor clever, but 90 minutes of enjoyable action hokum.

Dick jokes

In addition to all the inventive murdering, there are a lot of dick jokes in the film, like a lot. Not to be prudish, as I enjoy a good dick joke as much as the next person, but there were so many it started to get a bit ‘odd’. Perhaps this explains González’s restrained demeanour in these films.

There were other oddities too. Pike has a scene where she’s in full business clobber in her office, on a treadmill with headphones on, sweating profusely… why?

At another point, Cavill steals a sombrero, shouts “Oi-Oi” very loudly, and then urinates on a policeman’s shoes to distract attention. That’s fine, I suppose, but it’s mentioned again when he’s released from the local jail, for no reason other than, I suppose, the unabashed joys of urolagnia.

Bond bound?

So that’s that. If you’re at a loose end and want something to fill up an hour and a half of your time, then this is for you.

On which note, I was thinking if Denis Villeneuve’s James Bond reboot for MGM-Amazon works out, maybe they could let Ritchie do the next one.

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When Len Deighton died earlier this year, I was reminded of the luncheon party he hosted at The Savoy on 29 June 1984. The event was held to celebrate Eric Ambler’s 75th birthday. The photo above shows the writers who attended the gathering, and yes, it was an all-male affair. We have some snippets of detail about the afternoon, but these are at best sketchy.1 Given the attendees and their range of opinions, it was probably quite a lively afternoon.

[Worth mentioning here that the late Alan Rickman made his small-screen debut in the BBC’s Smiley’s People (1982) playing a concierge at The Savoy ]

In attendance to pay their respects to Ambler, the doyen of Anglophone ‘thriller’ writers, were Frederick Forsyth, Kingsley Amis, John le Carré, and, obviously, Deighton: all ‘big beasts’ in the writing world. Perhaps lesser-known were John Gardner, Julian Symons, Miles Tripp, Gavin Lyall and Lionel Davidson. Plus, there was one other author whom I had never heard of: Ted Allbeury.

It turns out Allbeury had written 40-plus spy thrillers and had a back story that reads like a novel. According to his entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography:

Shortly after the outbreak of the Second World War Allbeury responded to an advertisement in The Times seeking linguists for special work with the army. He was interviewed in the back room of a barber’s shop off Trafalgar Square, an encounter that he later wrote into several of his novels. Accepted into the intelligence corps, he served in Somalia, Ethiopia, the Sudan, Italy, and finally occupied Germany. He was demobilized in 1947 with the rank of lieutenant-colonel.

It is unclear whether, to what extent, and how long Allbeury continued in intelligence work after his official release in 1947; his own accounts varied.

This synopsis leaves out some more lurid details of his life that Deighton hinted at in the Guardian’s obituary:

During the cold war, Ted was running agents across the border that divided communist East Germany from the west. His luck ran out and the Russians left him nailed to a kitchen table in a farmhouse. Practised torturers, they made sure he had a chance to survive and take the story back to his fellow agents. The war never ended for him. His children were kidnapped and he pursued them to South America. Ted never told me what happened after that.

I urged Ted to write his memoirs but he could not be persuaded. He said he’d signed an official document that prevented him doing so. Well, that’s our loss, along with Ted himself:

And this still leaves out his stints as a chicken farmer, PR man and Pirate Radio DJ. You can get an idea of this varied background in this edition of the BBC’s Desert Island Discs.

I’ve only read a couple of his novels so far, and while they’re effective and low-key, I am not sure I’ll be rushing out to read all of the 38 others, but I will be trying one of his tales set in the Second World War next. I just finished his No Place to Hide (1986), and noticed that the late Sam Neill, starred in the film adaptation, which looks ever so slightly ropey.

Anyway, perhaps I’m the only one who’d never heard of Allbeury, but the interview below, for some Canadian news programme, gives some insight into the man; and it is intriguing. I would recommend a viewing.

Oh and apologies for mentioning so many dead people.

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This is less of a review, rather a link to my review of Filip’s new book for Engelsberg Ideas.

You can read my review here: https://engelsbergideas.com/reviews/the-afterlife-of-the-soviet-spy/

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And you can purchase the book, which I would recommend, here: https://utppublishing.com/doi/book/10.3138/9781487548926

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…I don’t think a Western academic workplace overwhelmed by the audit culture of the neoliberal university is the place from where that answer is most likely to emerge.1

I ‘rediscovered’ this post in my drafts folder, and realised I had started writing it about a year ago and then forgotten all about it.

12 months later, the situation for British tertiary education is even more precarious, troubling and existential than it was.2 While it’s not the case that all of Higher Education in the UK is about to collapse, a fair chunk of it might do, never mind the question of who’ll be left working in the sector in a few years.

I should start by admitting I have ‘skin in the game’, as an academic and university lecturer. For better or for worse, I’ve been ‘stuck’ in institutions of tertiary education since the early 1990s — starting at the then Oxford Polytechnic during the first Gulf War, if memory serves.3 For various reasons, I moved on to Hatfield Poly around the time it became a university to read history and literature on a bucolic rural campus known as Wall Hall, where Soul II Soul filmed its ‘back to life’ video — and no, I’ve no idea why they did it there.

Although the faculty who taught and inspired me have long gone, the University of Hertfordshire closed its History and the humanities department back in May; the old campus was turned into luxury housing some years before.

It’s discombobulating and uncomfortable to watch the sector you work in collapse around your ears. It’s not the first implosion of an industry I’ve witnessed, probably starting with mining in the 1980s followed by print journalism, nor will it be the last.

Was out having a drink with colleagues the other night, and as is increasingly the case these days, we toasted those who had completed their PhDs and gotten out of the ‘game’, those who’ve secured a decent enough redundancy package or can soon retire…OK, any comparison between the cosmology of the late Mr Omar Devone Little and British academics is a bit of a stretch. Still, the odds are stacked against both, and neither is likely to ‘win’ and walk away smiling — unless, of course, you take to the dark side of management; the money’s better, but the moral costs are higher.

Don’t recall anyone mentioning the last time they recommended a graduating student pursue a career in academia.

Looking at the links, articles and scraps of text I’d originally dumped on this page, I suppose I was then primarily concerned about the new Trump administration’s (perhaps ‘regime’ is a more accurate term) attack on the scourge of ‘Liberal Academia’, on ‘Woke’ and the supposed prevalence of Anti-Semitism on Campus. Back in May 2025, these seemed like ‘very real’ and pressing concerns.

Today they’re looking like less relevant, easily solvable issues.

As of June 2026, the current tally of redundancies from UK universities over the past three years stands at about 10,000 people per annum, and the bankruptcy of some British universities is no longer an abstract possibility. In response, wide acreages of the media landscape have been given over to questions of ‘What Must be Done?’, ‘Are degrees worth it?’, ' Students don’t read anymore’, the use of LLM AI or the sad state of the British student loans ‘scam’.

It IS a mess. Stefan Collini accurately details the descent to the current situation in the London Review of Books; read it and weep. Glen O’Hara skewers the ‘quiet collapse’ of the sector. There are multiple villains in this story, going all the way back to the Thatcher government in the early 1990s; all parties are complicit in the mounting levels of incompetence, as are university leaders and, to an extent, faculty themselves.

I was recently in a meeting where my institution’s management admitted one of the biggest challenges was trying to figure out what Government policy was, and in dealing with the sclerotic Office of Students.

As for the solution? These range from the moronic to the stupid.

My current ‘favourite’ is this insipid pile of shite from the Policy Exchange, Tarnished Towers: Fixing England’s Broken Higher Education System. It’s barely comprehensible gobbledygook.

What’s most depressing is the seeming lack of Government or societal interest in the fate of UKHE, and I don’t just mean my job, but the sector as a whole. Of course the solution will require committed interest in solutions and money, but the sector’s problems are presumably not insolvable for what is a crucial part of the national economy and society at large…but interest there is none.

Instead there’s endless and meaningless verbiage about the ‘value’ of degrees, or whether it gets the student a well-paying job, which are important issues, but not THE most important issues: what are universities for and how does a nation pay for them?

I’ll leave the final words to Glen O’Hara:

It seems depressing, too, that universities have now lost their bearings as centres to educate, enlighten and enliven – to really move and engage people with the daring adventure of learning. Heavily metricised, buried in audit and groaning under the weight of paperwork, no one seems to have told universities that these techniques were tested and found wanting by most private sector companies in the 1980s and 1990s, and by the UK’s central government in the 2000s and 2010s. ‘Get with the programme’ feels like chewing on dust when that programme is from the early eighties.4

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The price of freedom is high — far higher than that of slavery. And it is not paid in gold, nor in blood, nor in the most noble sacrifices, but in cowardice, in prostitution, in treachery, and in everything that is rotten in the human soul.

Curzio Malaparte, The Skin1

I finished reading Maurizio Serra’s biography of Curzio Malaparte, while sitting on a bench in an abandoned Catholic burial ground, perched above a tennis court in a ravine, opposite a large, wooded, Russian Orthodox cemetery. A juxtaposition of pursuits and faiths which is not wholly unrelated to the subject in hand. I had chosen a seat in the Spring sunshine, but an hour or two later, when I’d done reading, the leaves of an adjacent sapling had blocked its light, and it was getting chilly.

Around me, people walked their dogs, some exercised, others strolled past arm in arm, and a young couple sat on the next bench and ate their sandwiches before lighting up an exceedingly pungent joint. Still, I sat, thinking about the death of Malaparte. Or perhaps more accurately, admiring how skillfully Serra had concluded his biography.

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All biographies end in the same way, you might think, and yes, they do, with the death of the subject. How well the biographers tackle that inevitability varies widely: Richard Holmes’s Dr Johnson and Mr Savage deals with the latter’s, diminished, demise with style; while Sam Tanenhaus’s monumental Buckley: The Life and the Revolution That Changed America skips over Bill’s death after some 1000 pages of enoyable bike­shedding; having produced three volumes about Graham Greene, Norman Sherry couldn’t wait to kill him off; as for Artur Domosławski’s life of Ryszard Kapuściński, I didn’t get that far, having been exasperated by his endless surprise that not everyone in post-war Poland was an ardent anti-communist.

Conversely, Serra judiciously deals with Malaparte’s final trips in 1956 to the Soviet Union and Chairman Mao’s China, his cancer diagnosis exacerbated by ‘gas’ injuries from the First World War, his return to Rome and the squabbling over the fate of his immortal soul between Italian communists and Catholics. Serra precedes the account with references to the deaths of other great contemporary Italian poets and writers, and follows it with his stay in Malaparte’s seaside house on Capri. There’s pathos and panache in these concluding chapters, and an open admission that Malaparte the man remains somewhat unknowable, and on the whole quite unlikable.

Malaparte’s Progress

And yet, Malaparte left an artistic record of the world through which he moved, mainly in text, but also in film (much to my surprise), and in architecture.

He witnessed two World Wars at first hand, followed fascism somewhat (un)enthusiastically but closely enough to be implicated in murder, and later flirted with Maoism and died a Catholic (though was born a Protestant). He was a soldier, a diplomat, a journalist, a conformist, a collaborator, and a revolutionary. He witnessed the vigorous collaboration of Nazi Germany and its allies in the Holocaust, and he drank deeply of the bitter draughts of defeat.

Admittedly, this is a shallow and superficial run-through of his life. Though his summations of all these experiences, as expressed by the opening quote of this piece, speak for themselves.

He was also a liar.

He lied a lot, about many things. Even the name is a falsehood, a nom-de-plume, having been born Kurt Eric Suckert. He was vehemently homophobic, yet his relationships with women were peculiar to say the least. On the plus side, he loved dogs, was always impeccably dressed, and didn’t drink or smoke.

Finding Malaparte

Malaparte remains known — if he is remembered at all — for three, possibly four, things: being a Fascist, and an intimate of Benito Mussolini; then not being a fascist and lying about the earlier bit; building a modernist ‘villa’ on the island of Capri,2 and his 1944 book Kaputt, dealing with the Axis invasion of the Soviet Union.

I struggle to recall when I first heard Malapart’s name. I suspect, but no more than that, it was in relation to his strikingly austere house on Capri. The ‘villa’ later featured in Jean-Luc Godard’s Le Mépris [Contempt] (1963), with scenes directed by the great Fritz Lang. I’ve yet to visit, but would dearly love to. Peculiarly, the author gifted the house to the Chinese Communist Party in his Will, his family later reclaimed it, and it’s now an educational centre.

I should also admit I’ve read far less of his work than I should have, a situation exacerbated by my lack of Italian.3 From what I have read, it varies greatly from the sublime to the pedestrian. My partner recommended I read Kaputt some years ago, and of course, I dutifully did. It’s a remarkable book, perhaps the ‘best’ yet written about the war of extermination on the Eastern Front. Part reportage, part novel, part fantasy with more than a few echoes of the work of Kapuściński. Yes, Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate (1980) is extraordinary too, but I would argue Malaparte’s account is superior.

[Professor Adam Tooze has written an extensive review of Malaparte’s wartime publications, including Kaputt, The Volga rises in Europe and the follow-up, The Skin, which I would recommend. ]

Realism and Art

There are plenty of problems with the accuracy of Malaparte’s accounts of the war, from lies and embellishments to inaccuracies and outright fictions. But Serra argues there is a core truth in his works.

Perhaps less often addressed is Malaparte’s extensive discussions of sexual violence, exploitation and barter. He does not tackle the Soviet rape of German women in Berlin, because these acts had not yet occurred,4 but rather he dealt with widespread sexual violence and exploitation by both the Nazis and then the Allies. His accounts of post-war prostitution in Naples5 were considered so extreme that his book, The Skin, was banned by the Pope, and Malaparte didn’t return to the city for years due to the outcry.

Truth and lies.

The question remains, however, how ‘true’ Malaparte’s wartime accounts were. Serra investigates this question and many other related examples throughout his biography, and I’ll leave you with four quotes that illustrate his methods and the quality of his expression of such quandaries. Whatever we might think of Malaparte and his legacy, Serra’s execution of his biography is surely worthy of praise and measured consideration:

Maurizio Serra, Malaparte, p. 3716

Indeed, Malaparte had never been less politically or socially engaged than in this apocalyptic trilogy, confining himself to the role of memoirist and interlocutor in encounters that were often imaginary, but which all had some basis in truth.

He continues, p. 372

To call the books “novels,” then, is inaccurate. Yet it doesn’t seem incorrect to characterize them as “reportage,” even if of an uncommon level, insofar as they could have been, in their respective times, The Jewish War, by one Flavius Josephus, or A Journal of the Plague Year, by Defoe, known to have inspired Camus. Malaparte was certainly not the only great contemporary chronicler of the modern plague.

And on, p. 374 |

…with a slightly too insistent wink, in the page of The Skin where the French officer Pierre Lyautey asks him what truth there is in Kaputt, and the American colonel Jack Hamilton answers for him: “It’s of no importance whether what Malaparte relates is true or false. That isn’t the question. The question is whether or not his work is art.

Finally, and revelantly, p. 374

Malaparte paints a world shaken to its foundations, in which it has become nearly impossible to distinguish true from false. And this world is essentially the one we live in today, eighty years later, characterised by an unending series of massacres and the ceaseless intellectual tendency toward lies and bad faith. Kaputt glides like a bird of prey over all of Europe at war…

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Much to my own surprise, I rewatched Spectre in its entirety the other week. I didn’t plan to, but it popped up as a suggestion, I pressed play, and watched it all the way through to its multiple endings; three, so far as I could tell.

To be honest, I have a somewhat ambiguous relationship with the film. I took my partner to the cinema to see it when it was released, her first viewing of a Bond on the big screen, and we were both disappointed.

Watching it again, some eleven years later — and I am about 80% sure I haven’t bothered to watch it again in the meantime — perhaps I was a bit harsh with my original conclusions, some of the film does work well, but much doesn’t. Above all else, it seems to suffer from the core curse of many Bond films: an uncertain script, an issue that has often bedevilled the series since Dr No. (1962), and one that seems to have been a recurrent issue for the entirety of the Daniel Craig period.1

Most of all, I couldn’t help but wonder (admittedly in retrospect) how much better off the Bond franchise would have been if this film had been Craig’s final outing, had he driven off with Léa Seydoux’s Madeleine Swann at the end, rather than returned for a somewhat strained reprisal of their relationship in No Time To Die (2021).

The Mission: Impossible franchise tied things off with slightly more aplomb when Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) walked off into the London crowds for its 2025 finale. The last Jason Bourne (2016) was also probably misjudged but redeemable for the cracking Greek riot scenes [ain’t no riot like a Greek riot. Ed.], also opted for a last-minute disappearing act by Matt Damon.

Ending a franchise is obviously tricky, especially if the producers are hoping for yet more continuations to come, but fumbling a conclusion is just as bad, if not worse. The Bond franchise ended up killing its hero, which means the forthcoming Amazon/MGM reboot has a tricky resurrection to arrange, by no means impossible, but awkward to say the least.

That said, some of Spectre works really well; the opening pre-credits sequence is the second best of the Craig era. The film looks good, thanks to Hoyte van Hoytema’s camera work, the film has a outstanding cast, it’s chock full of delightful couture, locations and architecture:2 what doesn’t work is its misuse of Ernst Stavro Blofeld, the Bondiverse’s Ur-villain, returning for the first time time since Diamonds are Forever (1972),3 and a plot that pootles along for two thirds of the movie before just giving up the ghost.

I do not blame the scriptwriters. Neal Purvis and Robert Wade have been primarily responsible for the Bond scripts since the late 1990s, and they’ve written some corkers. But that’s not how the Bondian franchise machine works, and, perhaps too often, the clarity of storytelling, which Ian Fleming did so well, is lost in multiple rewrites and the complexities and travails of production. I suspect there is much to be written about Craig’s influence on the process. No, that’s not to blame him either; a deal was struck at some point, and he exercised his influence.

What works, and what doesn’t.

I would argue that one of the reasons why Spectre is so disappointing is that it starts so well; the opening twenty minutes or so positively zing and fizz with action and excitement: women, guns, collapsing buildings, helicopters, fights in upside-down helicopters! What’s not to like?

The scenes in Mexico City on the Day of the Dead encapsulate the whole Bond as a ‘blunt instrument’ idea, as Fleming put it, the ceaseless pursuit of the target, irrespective of the damage done and the risks to life and limb. Bond doesn’t ‘win’ because he’s stronger or cleverer, but because of his sheer bloody-mindedness, dumb luck, and a relaxed relationship with his Todestrieb.

Oh, and it’s a pleasant return to the mass crowd scenes of earlier Bonds.4

Getting the opening of a Bond film right is crucial, even if the rest of the film is mediocre, but ideally “collars and cuffs” should match (so to speak): The Spy Who Loved Me (1977) nails it, all the Bondian tropes are in place: girls, guns, skis, oh, and V. I. Lenin too,5 and then he skis off a cliff as Carly Simon starts to sing and a Union Jack parachute unfurls above his shoulders. The crowd goes wild.

Meanwhile, in Spectre, things rapidly take a turn for the worse with the arrival of the titles and the accompanying theme song; neither is bad, but in combination, they’re hardly a patch on what came before. Plus, I strongly suspect the entire title sequence is ‘borrowed’ from the opening of David Fincher’s remake of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011). While Sam Smith’s theme song, ‘The Writing’s on the Wall’, is fine, it doesn’t really inspire. Diamonds Are Forever is hardly a masterpiece, but we all remember the song…while forgetting just how bad the film actually was.

Actors and directors

There's certainly nothing wrong with the cast: Christoph Waltz; Léa Seydoux; Ben Whishaw; Naomie Harris; Dave Bautista; Monica Bellucci; Ralph Fiennes; and Andrew Scot. A veritable ‘stella line-up’, plus Sam Mendes returns for a second stint as director. Yet many of the above are underemployed, Ballucci and Waltz in particular. Bautista wanders around mutely with a double-barreled pistol,6 Fiennes, Whishaw and Scot effortlessly and enjoyably ham up every scene in which they appear.

But the script and the dialogue don’t seem to know what to do with most of them. They look good, they hit their marks and go through their paces, yet it’s a bit meh…The fact that the film’s great reveal is that Waltz’s Blofeld was jealous of Bond being adopted by his dad says it all: no notions of global domination, no mad plan to end humanity, just annoying petite bourgeoisie insecurity as motivation.

It was annoying, I am annoyed typing this sentence while thinking about it.

Another problem is the lack of on-screen chemistry between Craig and Seydoux, especially compared with Eva Green’s performance in Casino Royale (2006). This isn’t a random comparison, as it’s directly cited in the replication of the earlier film’s train scene. Both are excellent actors, yet they really do not seem to gel together (take a look at their body language in the unfortunate photo above).

Again, this happens, it’s not their fault, but to stretch this relationship over two separate films seems ill-advised.

So who is to blame for the lacklustre execution here?

I would probably have to plump for Mendes as the director, not least because he’s the only director apart from Terence Young to film two Bond films back-to-back, which can’t be easy, to put it mildly. Was it all too much, just a bit too far? Craig, who by all accounts begged Mendes to return, expressed his exhaustion after the filming was finished:

Time Out : Can you imagine doing another Bond movie?

DC: ‘Now? I’d rather break this glass and slash my wrists. No, not at the moment. Not at all. That’s fine. I’m over it at the moment. We’re done. All I want to do is move on.’

The Billion Dollar Brain

At the very heart of the matter, I would guess, is the simple fact that Skyfall (2012) earned a billion dollars of box office receipts, and Craig was contracted to do two more films. Add to that the fact that EON’s long-running feud with Kevin McClory ended, and the official franchise was able, once more, to resurrect Spectre.

I suppose they thought if throw in a load of great stars, cool locations, stunts and clothes, surely it would all come out in the wash? Ahh, well, you can’t win them all.

Tom Cruise and Christopher McQuarrie were arguably more successful with the final few Mission: Impossible films.

So, will I watch it again? Yes, I suppose so, it’s not a favourite of mine, but nor is Spectre the very worst Bond film, although any discussion of that particular villain, boys and girls, will have to wait for next time.

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They videoed it, at not perhaps the most flattering of angles, which you can access below, but hopefully of some interest.

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I wanted to write something a little more uplifting than my recent spate of doom-and-gloom postings. Things are grim enough, and I am sure I am not alone in seeking out somewhat lighter fare to lift the Fin de siècle ennui that blights us all.

Two events triggered this decision: firstly, I should be finishing a long-promised, and long-delayed book review, and this is a handy displacement activity; secondly, I was sitting by the Thames in the sunshine recently and started reading about the horrific mass murders committed in El Fasher, Sudan, and I had to stop. I will go back and finish the piece, but there’s a point you have to take a breather, look around and recharge. I’m fortunate enough to have that opportunity; many don’t.

A couple of actors in particular seem to be enjoying themselves these days: Jamie Lee Curtis & Ethan Hawke. The latter’s Blue Moon (2025) is probably my favourite film of the past 12 months, but Curtis is also amazing, and both just seem to be having fun with their roles. Oh, and I want to shoehorn in a reference to the magnificently foul-mouthed, hilarious Australian series Deadloch (2023-6), which proves you can have fun with ‘Woke-humour’ and not be a middle-aged white fella being a dick about it all.

Dancing in the dark

Let’s start in Las Vegas. I won’t pretend to be a huge fan of The Last Showgirl (2024); it’s OK, Pamela Anderson is fine, but towards the end, there’s a scene which pops, and that’s Curtis dancing to Bonnie Tyler’s ‘Total Eclipse of the Heart’. I was originally tempted to post a clip of the video, but I suspect that without watching the whole film, it simply won’t work.

Her dance is superb and sad, and pathetic and glorious all at the same time, which is no mean feat. Preusmably, there’s a nod here to her earlier enforced gireations in True Lies (1994), but this is something else. The scene is only about 2 minutes long, but Curtis steals the whole movie. I’m not sure why casinos seem to be having a comeback in films. Netflix’s The Ballad of a Small Player (2025) also doesn’t quite work for my money, but the interiors of Macau’s gambling hotels are utterly absorbing.

Curtis also steals the show in Amazon’s adaptation of Patricia Cornwell’s Scarpetta books, which I gave up on after one episode (my better half completed the series), Curtis is wonderful (keep an eye out for her flashing Xmas earrings).

Talking of dancing onscreen, I should mention Ralph Fiennes’s OTT performance to The Rolling Stones’ ‘Emotional Rescue’ from 2015’s A Bigger Splash, which is well worth a viewing if you haven’t seen it already. Or you could watch Daniel Middel’s hoola-hoop dancing vids on TikTok, which are fantastic and lovely.

Ethan Hawke’s return

Moving on, some people dislike Ethan Hawke ( or so I’ve been informed), which is fair enough, and I must confess that, except for his performances in the first two films of Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise (1995) series, I’ve not really held any strong opinions about his work. He’s had some standout roles, such as in Gattaca (1997), Sidney Lumet’s Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead ( 2007) and Boyhood (2014), but on the whole, I’ve been a bit nonplussed (Nope, I didn’t rate Training Day (2001)). Perhaps that’s unfair, though I honestly can’t say I’d seek out his work, until now that is.

Hawke recently starred in the FX series The Lowdown and in Linklater’s Blue Moon, and both are a goddam delight. In Lowdown, Hawke plays Lee Rayborn, “… a citizen journalist and self-dubbed "truthstorian" who lives in a bookstore”, he’s also an idiot. What unfolds is a silly, amusing, diverting semi-Noir tall tale that goes nowhere and has fun doing so.

Blue Moon charts the final days of the diminutive lyricist and alcoholic Lorenz Milton Hart, half of the Broadway songwriting team of Rodgers and Hart. The film is brilliant, and sad and pathetic too, echoing Curtis dance, and it’s possibly Hawke’s greatest performance to date. Linklater has also knocked out Nouvelle Vague (2025), which I thought was better than Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless (1960), although that’s probably heresy.

Hawke has, like Curtis, reached a point in his career where he seems to have blossomed. I’m not sure why, though, I suspect the correction printed below from the Financial Times might explain it:

Researcher Brené Brown was misquoted in an interview published on April 6. She described herself as “solidly in my fuck it era” rather than “solidly in my fucking era”.

Fuck it Era

Lesbian-themed comedies seem to be enjoying something of a renaissance as of late, and that’s no bad thing. Having said that, Kate McCartney and Kate McLennan’s Deadloch on Amazon blow them all out of the water. Quite how they managed to get Amazon to agree to make such a vulgar, sweary, serial-killing comedy is anyone’s guess, yet they have, and it’s glorious. Don’t think I’ve laughed so much at anything in years.

Sadly, I’ve binged-watched both series and will have to wait and see if they make a third. If you have problems with people saying the C-word every 5 seconds, then you might not like it, but the swearing used here has evolved into a higher art form; it’s seriously impressive. On top of that, they rip-the-piss out of the manosphere, Australians, colonialism, TV cops and drones and almost everything else.

You’ll get a sence of it all when I mention in the second series they refer to the lower portion of the trunk of a dismembered corpse as ‘dick-bum’. That’s probably the only quote I can get away with citing on here. The cast are all excellent, the script is superb, and the swearing is big and clever.

Drop whatever you’re doing and go watch it, it’s a perfect antidote to the malaise of observing the ongoing enshittification of planet Earth by murderous morons.

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The first rule in politics is that there are no rules, at least not in the sense of inevitable defeats or inevitable victories. If you have the right policy and the right strategy, you always have a chance of winning. Without them, you can lose no matter how certain the victory seems.

― Tony Blair, A Journey: My Political Life, Knopf Doubleday, 2010 1

Tony Blair is a liar, and the person he lies to most often is himself.

Tony’s great lie was about the supposed justification of war in Iraq in 2003. That lie set us on the path to the flaming rubble of Tehran. This has not been a straight road down to hell, there were detours, populated with assorted Quislings and detractors, and chances for alternative routes not taken, but it is Tony’s path, he helped lay those first flagstones upon which others now tread.

Just maybe, had Tony resisted the allure of President Donald Trump’s pathetic Board of Peace, or refused President Nursultan Nazarbayev’s blood money to fund his Institute, or kept his mouth shut about Sir Keir Stammer’s (admittedly somewhat incoherent but correct) decisions over the USA’s Operation ‘Epic Futility’ then he might have retained some ragged scraps of the cloak of creditability he once wore.

But he couldn’t, because he’s a liar, who lies to himself.

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Blair’s former successes, of which he had many,2 are increasingly difficult to recall because the arc of his political journey bent eastward to Mesopotamia and to lies, murder, mayhem and failure.

Tony’s road to purgatory may well have be paved with his good intentions, and I do not doubt his intentions were once good, but he’s a liar and they now count for nought. What ever he might think Tony will never get past the Pearly Gates when he goes to see his maker, instead he’ll spend all eternity in a flaming Bone Temple made from the skulls of dead Iraqi children, being endlessly urinated on by the headless corpse of Saddam Hussein, while Alastair Campbell plays the bagpipes.

Too much? Then I suspect you’re better off reading something else then.

Mea culpa

I am not unsympathetic to Blair’s plight. I, along with a fair chunk of the British electorate, willed on and cheered New Labour’s electoral success in 1997. For a moment there I thought we’d turned a corner. I thought (albeit briefly) Robin Cook’s ethical foreign policy was possible and that Cool Britannia was a thing to savour after 18 years of Tory misrule.3

For all too brief a time, two years at most, the future looked bright and then, by 1999 it all started going to pot, instead of bases on the Moon4 we got Bill Clinton’s blowjobs, Kosovo, 9/11, the Global War on Terror and then Iraq. I risk veering into maudlin nostalgia here, but Britain "… coulda been a contender" instead of the sad, damp, post-Brexit island off the coast of Europe it is today. The real tragedy was not the failure, we all fail, but the useless squandering of the optimism those 24 short months generated.

No, Tony is not solely to blame for it all; a confederacy of dunces were to follow (all pale imitations of his premiership, just as he cosplayed Thatcherism with ‘a human face’ and a cock ), but Tony cheered, and Tony cajoled and Tony’s complicit. Moreover, Tony never apologised, and he’s still lying to himself.

Ahh well, you live and learn.

Live, lying Blair

I was reminded of my misplaced optimisms in Blair’s New Labour project via a recent Channel Four documentary about the man. I recommend readers track it down and watch it. It’s not perfect, and criticisms can be leveled at it, but you get to hear the lies from the horse’s mouth.

There’s a quite remarkable Greek chorus of talking heads on display, from Blair’s long suffering family, to Clinton to poor Gordon Brown, Jeremey Corbyn, and most deliciously of all, a pre-fall Peter Mandelson, the chum of paedophiles.

There are no great revelations in the series, but Tony’s abject refusal to acknowledge even the slightest error over Iraq shines through. Even ‘dodgy dossier’ Campbell seems somewhat contrite over his role, well, somewhat.

When Tony left office in the summer of 2007 could have rested on his frayed and blood splattered laurels, but he’s a liar who lies to himself, so he couldn’t. He was quiet for a while, taking money to fund his institute and now he’s thrown his lot in with with the ghastly plans to cleanse the charnel house of Gaza, a grim reversal for the savior of the women and children of Kosovo, and pontificates about the bombing of Iran.

Tony’s a liar with no shame, he should be shunned and ignored, his utterances unrecorded, and he should be forced to walk in penance through the streets of Bagdad, dressed in sackcloth and dosed in ashes. But there’s no justice in this world and he won’t be; he lives in riches and he doubtless sleeps soundly in silk sheets, convinced of his own righteousness.

Viva Corbynistas!

Somewhat amusingly, it’s Corbyn, who would have doubtless been a terrible Prime Minister, who emerges vindicated from this documentary. I’d watched Corbyn talk in Hyde Park on 15 February 2003, and whatever you might think of him (I won’t pretend to be a huge fan), his reputation, such as it is, remains less tarnished than Blair’s. It’s funny how these things work out sometimes.

By happenstance, a younger Corbyn was sat behind Tony Benn when the latter gave his much quoted speech on 17 February 1998, railing against an earlier round of bombings of Iraq. (I interviewed Benn before his death, he made me a cup of tea and we chatted about what he remembered about his time in the Cabinet in the mid-1970s, which wasn’t much beyond his diary entries to be honest.)

Think what you like about Benn but by god he had a moral stance on war, unlike Blair, which we’d all be well advised to recall, and his words are a tonic to all this talk of Tony and all those who now profess their piety over the bombing of Tehran:

Hansard, 17 Feb 1998 : Cos 926-28

I hope that the House will listen to me. I know that my view is not the majority view in the House, although it may be outside this place …

The first victims of the bombing that I believe will be launched within a fortnight will be innocent people, many, if not most, of whom would like Saddam to be removed. The former Prime Minister, the right hon. Member for Huntingdon, talked about collateral damage. The military men are clever. They talk not about hydrogen bombs but about deterrence. They talk not about people but about collateral damage. They talk not about power stations and sewerage plants but about assets. The reality is that innocent people will be killed if the House votes tonight--as it manifestly will--to give the Government the authority for military action….

…War is easy to talk about; there are not many people left of the generation which remembers it….

I was in London during the blitz in 1940, living where the Millbank tower now stands, where I was born. Some different ideas have come in there since. Every night, I went to the shelter in Thames house. Every morning, I saw docklands burning. Five hundred people were killed in Westminster one night by a land mine. It was terrifying. Are not Arabs and Iraqis terrified? Do not Arab and Iraqi women weep when their children die? Does not bombing strengthen their determination? What fools we are to live as if war is a computer game for our children or just an interesting little Channel 4 news item.

On 24 October 1945--the right hon. Member for Old Bexley and Sidcup [Edward Heath] will remember--the United Nations charter was passed. The words of that charter are etched on my mind and move me even as I think of them. It says:

“We the peoples of the United Nations determined to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, which twice in our life-time has brought untold sorrow to mankind”.

That was that generation’s pledge to this generation, and it would be the greatest betrayal of all if we voted to abandon the charter, take unilateral action and pretend that we were doing so in the name of the international community. I shall vote against the motion for the reasons that I have given.

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Memory is a curious thing.

I remember exactly where I was when I first heard about the invasion of Afghanistan in 1980,1 the breaking news about the death of Princess Diana and the execution of the Ceaușescus.2 Yet I have no memory whatsoever of the fall of the Berlin Wall, none, zilch. I’ve now watched the footage of the Wall being breached a million times, but I have zero recollection of it happening.

9/11 was, and remains, fundamentally different.3 Not because I was there, or knew anyone who perished in the attacks, but rather because the coverage was so all-encompassing, so all-consuming and cinematic. That footage, those scenes of aeroplanes meeting concrete and steel, of unseen terrified passengers, of the collapsing towers, the falling people, the dust, the wreckage. Tens, if not hundreds of millions of people around the globe, watched the televised destruction of those landmark buildings, and the deaths of 2,996 human beings, in real time and on repeat, over and over again for hours.4

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Did Osama bin Laden intend to create such a terrible tableau that still haunts so many and to trigger the rage that followed? I don’t know. If that was his goal, then surely he was the greatest criminal genius of the age: a veritable terror Moriarty. We should also take care to separate the two events: 9/11 and the Global War on Terror (GWOT) are linked, but the latter did not inevitably follow the former; it could have been avoided or at least conducted differently.5

The vengeance that ensued, in which so many were complicit (multiple caveats below6), the invasions and wars, assassinations, the drone strikes and torture, renditions and ‘black sites’, uprisings and ISIL (Da’esh),7 left a grotesque bloody smear across the first two decades of the Twenty-First Century. The gloves were off, the rules slackened, and all might was right, because that had to be so to defeat the scourge of Al-Qaida.8

An estimated 940,000 human beings were killed in these wars, and indirectly, 4.5 million may have died as a result. Very few of these people were responsible for 9/11, and it may be presumed their rights to life, liberty, and justice are equal to those who died in New York, Washington D.C. or on Flight 93.

Such retribution isn’t novel by any means, although the sheer brazen shamelessness of its enforcement in the 2000s may have been. During the Cold War, similar methods were often employed by all sides,9 if more discreetly; as Control put it to Alec Leamas in the early 1960s:

“…we do disagreeable things, but we're defensive. Our policies are peaceful, but our methods can't afford to be less ruthless than those of the opposition, can they? Yes. I mean, occasionally [...] we have to do wicked things. Very wicked things, indeed. But, uh, you can't be less wicked than your enemies simply because your government's policy is benevolent, can you?”

That hideous GWOT streak, now crusted and darkened, is oftentimes harder to discern. Still, like Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev’s ‘shapeless’ sea monsters,10 it resurfaces in the ruins of El Fasher or in Gaza, on the Ukrainian steppe, in Venezuelan ‘panic rooms’ or across Renee Good’s windscreen.

The spectre of the GWOT haunts our world, as do its dead; it’s not a positive legacy and has contributed to the current mess we’re in.11 I am not suggesting that 9/11 somehow supersedes all other events, nor that it is the only crime that should be committed to memory. For many people, the footage of the crumbling towers remains vivid, and was a ‘justifiable excuse’ for the pitiless ‘forever wars’ that followed.

Or at least it did; it’s being forgotten now. Or perhaps I should say it’s getting increasingly hazy, more difficult to recall so clearly, receding into the depths, 20 years of unrestrained revenge for 9/11 replaced by other numbers, by other dates and by other, more recent, horrors.

Forgetting the Global War on Terror

What exactly do I mean?

After all, some of you reading this will be saying to yourselves, “I haven’t forgotten it!” Some may have served in the GWOT, in one capacity or another. So too, a sombre memorial stands in New York, shredded fragments of the Twin Towers can be found in distant museums, next to shards of the Berlin Wall, and there are plenty of related books, documentaries and films. As I write this, President Donald Trump has yet again put his foot in his mouth by downplaying the NATO military contributions in Afghanistan (now partially retracted). So how can it be forgotten?

As is often the case, it’s not really about you, or me, or the bane of the supposed superiority of lived experience. Put simply, there’s an ever-growing number of people out there for whom 2001 is ancient, irrelevant history, while others are actively engaged in ignoring or downplaying the GWOT to suit alternative narratives.

Commentaries are being written in which the responses to 9/11, the triggering of NATO’s Article 5, and the two decades-long occupations in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria, or operations in Sudan, Somalia, Libya, and the Philippines, are apparent by their absence.

This bothers me because, like it or not, the GWOT helps explain how we arrived at our current situation in 2026. Would Trump’s increasingly bizarre demarches and actions both at home and abroad really have been possible without it? If we’re serious about explaining how the post-1945 ‘Rules-Based International Order’ faltered and ‘broke’, and maybe how to fix it, then we should admit the 9/11-GWOT vortex played a role.

Any omission, obfuscation or denial of that ‘age of rage’ is, in my estimation, profoundly problematic.12

The Ukrainian Factor

The clearest examples of such an approach can be found in those commentaries related to Russia’s invasions (2014-22) of Ukraine, and to a lesser extent, those about NATO’s post-1989 enlargements.13 The ‘Rules-Based International Order’, or so this narrative goes, was solely destroyed by Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin and his ‘useful idiots’ in the West (read French and Germans), who failed to do what was necessary to defend Ukraine from Moscow’s revanchist imperialism.

Perhaps it’s unfair to pick solely on Eerik-Niiles Kross’s article (cited above); there are dozens of others to choose from. An interview with Ivan Kransev in The New Yorker ranges widely, from Munich in 1938 to the fall of the Wall in 1989, but he makes no mention at all of the War on Terror. Timothy Snyder’s recent Substack about US actions in Venezuela does mention the invasion of Iraq in 2003, but not Afghanistan. There’s a fleeting reference to Iraq in Alexander Stubb’s piece in Foreign Affairs, although again, the wider GWOT is glossed over. At Davos, Mark Carney referenced “two decades” of crises in finance, health, energy and geopolitics, but he didn’t utter the ‘G’ word.14

These positions are perfectly understandable; one man alone is responsible for the unwarranted and illegal invasion of Ukraine, and its horrific death toll, and that is Putin. Nonetheless, this stance is equally designed to suppress a dirty little secret about the new NATO members’ collusion and collaboration in the GWOT, and the associated indulgence of Russia.

I get it. Russia is a clear and present danger, and its invasion of Ukraine is an obscenity. However, I can’t help but notice the absence of references to the GWOT in so much of this commentary.

Anna Applebaum actively supported the overthrow of the ‘Hitler-like’ Saddam Hussein, and has since been more discreet about the rift that tore the Old and New Europe(s) apart.

As she put it back in 2001:

The War on Terrorism also provides, like the Cold War, a quick and easy guide to choosing allies and enemies, and also creates, like the Cold War, a series of moral dilemmas in consequence. Once, Americans found themselves on the same side as African, South American and Filipino dictators in the fight against communism, forced to support “our bastards” against “their bastards”.

For while at least Putin was ‘our bastard’ and all those countries that subsequently headed to Mesopotamia were complicit in positioning him as such (which many lie about today). Lest we forget, Putin was an early supporter of the GWOT, and the ‘West’ & NATO took its collective eyes off Russia to focus on the Middle East.

The then-current crisis was in the Levant, not in Chechnya, nor in Georgia, or Ukraine; equally, the Chinese were given a ‘pass’ in their handling of ‘radicalised’ Uyghur Muslims. There’s also surely something problematically emblematic of the fact that the CIA’s Jawbreaker mission flew a Soviet-era Mi-17 Hip helicopter into Afghanistan just 15 days after 9/11: enduring freedom delivered upon Soviet wings.

So long as you were hunting terrorists during the Noughties, you were on the right side of history, you were one of the ‘good guys’.

Similar silences are observable in the literature about NATO’s Eastward enlargement, and its alleged role in triggering Russian wrath (no, it didn’t, but it did play a role). I can’t be bothered to list them all here, as this is all getting a bit ranty and long-winded, but now you know what you’re looking for, you should be able to spot them.

By the time George Bush tried to unilaterally open up the NATO Membership Action Plan to Georgia and Ukraine in 2008, the die had been cast, and the trust lost. Scepticism of Washington’s motives — dodgy dossiers and WMDs — later coloured responses to the CIA’s (totally accurately, as Tim Weiner has detailed) warnings of Putin’s plan to invade Ukraine in late 2021.

The problems of periodisation

Thus, two distinct and unconnected narratives have emerged about the opening decades of the Twenty-First Century: the first in which the GWOT plays a central role in explaining how we got to where we are today; the second, focused on the likes of actions of Russia, China and Iran, largely ignores the legacies of 9/11-GWOT.

The moment of ‘rupture’, to quote Carney again, which moulded these two tales, was surely 9/11, followed by mythical WMDs in Iraq and the psychopathic brutality of ISIL and its caliphate of murder.

Of course, this neat distinction is too monodimensional, too simplistic to be wholly credible. The world didn’t change completely with the dawn’s effulgence on 12th September 2001. Many antecedents led us to where we are today, from the terrorism of Timothy McVeigh to the Unipolar moment of the early 1990s, spurned on by Francis Fukuyama’s foolishness and even back further into the murderous intemperance of the Cold War.

My point is not that 9/11 and the GWOT explain everything, but rather that little can be comprehended if they’re both ignored or forgotten.

The Age of Rage & Rupture

As I mentioned previously, these musings were triggered by listening to the London Review of Books’ podcast Aftershock: The War on Terror. The series forced me to recall that day, I, as did many of you, watched the Twin Towers collapse.15 So too, my train of thought was directed by the following quote from President Joe Biden, uttered just days after the Hamas attacks in Israel on 7 October 2023:

“I caution this: while you feel that rage, don’t be consumed by it…After 9/11, we were enraged in the United States. When we sought justice and got justice, we also made mistakes.”

President Joseph Biden, 18 October 2023.

Perhaps Biden’s statement undermines my thesis that the GWOT is fading from our collective memory, but his core message was nevertheless studiously ignored. Subsequently, many Israeli commentators defended their actions in Gaza with wildly whataboutist references to the conduct of the War on Terror, or via comparisons with the allied actions against ISIL in Mosul.

According to Haaretz, the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) now accept the figure of 70,000 dead in Gaza: the response to the 1,195 Israelis, and 79 foreign nationals, who were murdered, the 4,800 people injured, and the 250 men, women and children who were taken hostage on 7 October. The violent rage of war in Gaza, supposedly against Hamas and not the Palestinian people, will doubtless now fester in its own special putrefaction.

For my sins, the other day I listened to that offensive fascist, and all round little shit, Nick Fuentes’ spout his pathetically antisemitic comments about the Holocaust; afterwards I couldn’t help but wonder if Dirk Moses and others are right, and it will be the memory of the Shoah that will ultimately pay the butcher’s bill for the charnel house that was once Gaza.

We can’t remember everything, but we forget awkward moments at our peril, and the comforts of amnesia are but short-lived.

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I occasionally try to summarise what I’ve been reading, watching and listening to, although I notice it’s been over a year since I last attempted to do so. So here are a few things that caught my attention. Make of them what you will.

Listening

One of my principal joys in 2025, apart from my family [*poker face], was listening to David Cornwall read the works of John le Carré. I’ve gone through six or seven [howls of delight from the children] of his adaptations, and they’re a total goddam delight.

I can’t be arsed to list all the ones I’ve listened to, but they’ve all been great, even some of his later, ‘lesser’ novels.1 For me, the revelation was his A Delicate Truth (2013), which I’d read at the time and was not overly impressed with, but listening to le Carré’s sublime narration, I’ve had to reconsider. Perhaps it is one of the great novels of the GWOT?

His son, Nick Harkaway, also mentioned ADT as one of his underrated masterworks at a recent talk at King’s College London, and I’d have to agree.

The BBC’s radio adaptations of le Carré’s books are also worth checking out.

Oh, and Philippe Sands reading his own 38 Londres Street: On Impunity, Pinochet in England and a Nazi in Patagonia is brilliant too, and includes a surprise, distantly observed, appearance by le Carré.

Admittedly, not all audio adaptations work well; some are quite unlistenable to, and I wish I’d read the book instead. But when they do work, they really bring something new to the text.

Podcasts

As for my ongoing podcast obsessions, The New Books Network continues its sterling work, as does the BBC’s Ukrainecast (sadly, no longer available weekly as of 2026?) and Haaretz’s English-language programs. I would also recommend The Columbia Journalism Review’s The Kicker.

Three outstanding pods I consumed this year are as follows:

The London Review of Books’ Aftershock about 9/11 and the GWOT, admittedly from a narrowly Anglo-centric perspective, but worth recalling those events so often ‘forgotten’ since 2022.

The BBC’s Anatomy of a Cancellation, about Kate Clanchy’s memoir Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me. Perhaps it’s not perfect, but lots to chew on in this series.

Rachael Maddow’s Burn Order about the illegal internment of Japanese-Americans during the Second World War: it wears its production values on its sleeve, but is none the worse for it and has some profound things to say.

And this one too, which was not a subject nor an approach I’d ever considered, but which was masterfully tackled here, The Palestine-Mexico Border, with Alexander Aviña.

Reading

OK, so these are all a bit mannish and not so fictional, but these are the books that most securely grabbed my attention this year. I read plenty of others that ranged from the excellent to the torpid to the unreadable.

Richard Holmes’ dual biography is over thirty years old, but I finally got around to it, and it was well worth the wait. While I know next to nothing about the early C18th this was hauntingly beautiful and a masterclass in how biography should be written.

Sam Tanenhaus’s Buckley biography is not in the same class as Holmes’ work, and to be honest, the last fifth or sixth of the book was a bit pedestrian, though it merits much praise for its painstaking (at over 1300 pages) dissection of Buckley’s ‘conservatism’ and its links to the American right’s recent revival. His and his family’s unfailing ability to be on the ‘wrong’ side of every political debate for almost a century was quite remarkable.

Tim Weiner’s The Mission: The CIA in the 21st Century and Chris Heath’s No Road Leading Back are very different books, yet both authors share a dogged obsession with their subject matter. They also illustrate a slightly annoying trait, that sometimes the best books about the past are written by non-historians, not always, but sometimes.

Also of interest:
Johnhenry Gonzalez’s Maroon Nation. A History of Revolutionary Haiti

Seth Harp’s, The Fort Bragg Cartel. Drug Trafficking and Murder in the Special Forces

I very much enjoyed Adam Brooks’s Night Heron trilogy. I consumed them all back-to-back, although I think they’re well over a decade old, and it’s a shame no one’s dramatised them as yet — although I suppose the Chinese angle might hinder funding.

Colum McCann’s Twist was a good read too, although I’m not entirely sure what to make of it

Finally, I ‘discovered’ the work of Barbara Pym, about whom I must confess my total ignorance but will be returning to read more of her work.

Watching

I can’t pretend to have seen all the films I should have this year, and there are a few left to catch up with, yet I feel it was a slightly disappointing year for cinema.

Consequently, I rewatched a lot of old favourites, most recently James Cameron’s True Lies, which the rest of the family has never seen, and it remains a textbook example of how to do the OTT action film. I rewatched David Fincher’s Zodiac (2007) at least twice again, too, and Woody Allen’s 1970s films.

My partner thought Brazil’s The Blue Trail was the best film of the year she’s seen, but I haven’t watched it, so I have no idea. One to look out for.

Steven Soderbergh continues to produce small, clever and very watchable films. His Black Bag was a delight and a starry cast and locations in some of my favourite corners of London. Richard Linklater’s Nouvelle Vague, a recreation of the making of Jean-Luc Godard’s debut 1960 classic À Bout de Souffle is equally delightful and just ignore the grumpy reviews.

Then we have two masterpieces of resistance, and resistance is undoubtedly the watchword of 2025, because if you’re not resisting, you’re effectively collaborating (kinda stings, doesn’t it?).

I’ve largely despised most of the Star Wars movies/series so far, but I binged both series of Andor this summer, and it was brilliant. I’m hardly the first to spot this, but I’m just jumping on the bandwagon. Then there’s One Battle After Another, which I just loved as did many others. Yes, there are some problematic representations of African-American women in it, and some positive ones too, and then there’s Sean Penn’s Lockjaw walk. All great. Certainly a film I will be re-watching over the coming months.

Let’s see what 2026 brings; fingers crossed, it’ll be marginally less horrible for many.

The above title is not simply designed to be salacious; well, yes, it IS partly intended to be salacious, but not wholly. There is a point here. I am attempting to refer to that hoary old favourite of history exam questions: continuity and change.

I was reminded of the Bill Clinton sex scandal (1998)1 while listening to an interview with Olivia Nuzzi,2 who admitted that Monica Lewinsky had reached out to her to check if she was OK. Quite by chance, these two stories, separated by 27 years, coalesced just days before the release of Donald J. Trump’s new National Security Strategy (NSS) on 4 December 2025.

There are, as I hope to tease out, some tentative connections between these events, and the new right’s hatred of the Clintons and the dissolution of the rules-based international order they helped craft in the 1990s.

(This may fail spectacularly, but at least I get to make some inappropriate jokes for the festive season.)

From Russia with Love.

The NSS is yet another shabby, shameless Trumpy document that has been rightly received with much wailing and nashing of teeth.3 Although, to be fair, it does accurately reflect the peculiar ‘ideology’ of the current administration. Particularly, the debt it owes to the concepts of the new right (MAGA or the Dark Enlightenment, or whatever it calls itself now), and to naked narcissism. Naturally, it has its apologists: predictably, Professor Niall Ferguson has penned a long ‘realist’ defence of the document in The Times.4

While I can’t spot any mention of new directives in the NSS regarding drinking red wine with fish—excluding the obvious: an appropriate Pinot Noir or a lightly chilled Fleurie5—it does claim that Russia is no longer a threat to America, while the European Union (EU) now is.

This might come as a shock to anyone who has not been paying attention, especially to some in the ‘New Europe’, but the NSS’s key takeaway is that Moscow is nowadays a friend.6

Profit through Peace

The NSS’s other message of Profit through Peace is buttressed with a call for the end of liberal interventionism, of liberalism more generally, for the surrender of Ukraine to Russian occupation, and the identification of the EU as the institution accelerating the death of white, Christian Europe, resulting in the “stark prospect of civilizational erasure.”7 Nor will NATO be enlarging further, a good 17 years after George W. Bush unilaterally offered up new applications. Such a stance bodes ill for Kyiv. Ukraine will be thrown under the bus, and the EU will have to pick up the pieces, if they can.

You’ll have noticed most of the above were championed by Clinton in the 1990s — ahh, so now you see where I am going with this.

Oh, and apparently resurgent, revisionist nationalism, a la Yoram Hazony, is just fine and dandy.8 Poor Richard Holbrook must be spinning in his grave, while Slobadan Milošević is nodding along in his, mumbling, “I told you so”. China remains a threat, sort of, but deals can be made. North Korea is absent. Curiously, Israel gets short shrift, and there’s no mention of the Gaza Riviera.

Its tone is implicitly white supremacist, anti-tolerance (although admittedly there’s no explicit retraction of the Peace of Augsburg, 15559), it’s avowedly anti-LBGTQ+, misogynistic (coded as Trad-wife goes full Kinder, Küche, Kirche ), as well as all the other krazy things set out in D. J. Vance’s Munich speech and the Heritage Foundation’s asinine Project 2025.

Basically, it’s all (white)10 business 24/7, and all other bets are off. The general thrust is that business is good, especially for those American businesses close to the White House; peace helps business, and thus, all wars must end, except, obviously, the wars on drugs and on woke [Woke drugs? Ed.].

Napoleon is famously, but probably falsely, supposed to have referred to the British as a ‘Nation of shopkeepers’; perhaps it’s time we should start referring to the Americans as a nation of carpetbaggers.

The death of the rules-based international order

I would argue this dickish document is designed in part to roll back the ‘achievements’ of the two Clinton administrations, especially the ideas of humanitarian intervention, the responsibility to protect, nation-building, and NATO enlargement.

All bad. Apparently.

Whether we like it or not, much of what we understand as the current international rules-based order evolved in the 1990s, during Bill Clinton’s dual tenure.11 No, that doesn’t mean he invented it or that he intentionally constructed it, any more than Ronald Reagan ‘won’ the Cold War, but he was there at the time, and it bears his imprimatur.

Yes, there’s also a whole mess of stuff in the middle, too, Somalia, Rwanda, Kosovo, the GWOT, the invasion of Iraq, and anything Barack Obama said or did, but Bill came first.

Admittedly, Clinton’s strategic security policy was something of a Curate’s egg: fashioned as much by necessity as by intent. Much of it failed, and many innocent civilians suffered as a consequence. Some of it worked too: the Dayton and Oslo Accords, trade with the Americas, transitions in CEE and the ongoing dissolution of the Soviet Union and contacts with Moscow.

All of which had implicit faults, but they were arguably manageable with enough Executive attention and if Al Gore could have just won the presidency in 2000… Ah, well.

Then came the phallic pivot-point.

I’m forever blowing ‘Bubba’

Lest we forget, this most recent re-erection of the American right can be traced (in part) to the start of Kenneth Starr’s investigation into Clinton’s ‘immorality’ in January 1998 and his attempts at impeachment.12 That’s a woefully crude oversimplification and just one in a series of American conservative reactions to prior presidential policies: from Franklin D. Roosevelt’s ‘socialism’, to Jimmy Carter’s Solar Panels.

Equally, the likes of John Ganz, Laura K Fields, and Sam Tanenhaus, all far cleverer people than I, have dated this revival at various points from the 1930s to the 1990s, and resulting from a variety of causations, both ideological and practical.

Despite all that, I would argue, 1997 was the last ‘good’ year, before it all enshitified.

Nineties nostalgia

Like all nostalgia, my thesis has more holes in it than the Pope’s socks.13 I suspect there are multiple ways to deflate my argument or reject my peculiar periodisation.

Nevertheless, in ‘97, Tony Blair emereged the left’s credible great white hope; he wasn’t yet a war criminal: the EU was enlarging and pretending to be a beacon of civilised humanity, and the Berlin Wall was still something to be avoided, rather than replicated; a bright new digital future beckoned, with real human content, and US Presidents retained some residual credibility.

Plus, the 1990s were the golden age of fuck-noir, the erotic Nineties, Oasis, Steps [Wot? Ed.], Lads Mags and CoolBritannia, and all seemed fine with the world, so long as you didn’t look too closely.

Meanwhile, Harvey Weinstein, Jeffrey Epstein, P. Diddy, Michael Jackson, and Bill Cosby,14 and doubtless others, were carrying out their abuses, unmolested. Clinton’s crime, and it was the act itself rather than his getting caught we should rightly focus on, might seem relatively minor compared to those listed above, but it probably had a greater impact.

Genitalism, the new IR Theory

Some might argue the President’s penis is not a suitable subject for geopolitical discussions. Rather great events, big ideas or inventions, should rightly be the focus for study rather than middle-aged, white men’s sexual peccadilloes.

I suspect those who’d say that are the ones who read Thucydides or Machiavelli at graduate school, and somehow skipped Homer, Herodotus and Livy. After all, the Trojan Wars commenced due to Paris’s lust for Helen, and according to Herodotus, the Persians' beef with the Greeks began with the Phoenicians’ kidnapping of Io, the daughter of Inachos. And let’s not forget the rape of Sabine women.

Only time will tell if Epstein’s predilections for industrial levels of child abuse might yet still bring down another President.

Be that as it may, the President’s penis was much discussed in 1998, and the ensuing scandal meant he took his eye off multiple balls [OK enough now. Ed. ]. We can fantasise that had Clinton remained focused on Kosovo, on Bin Laden, or relations with the newly installed Putin, or on the elections of 2000, things might be different today, and maybe his rules-based order might have had time to embed itself more firmly. Maybe.

Clinton could not have done it, though, could he? No more than John F. Kennedy could stop his womanising, or L.B. Johnson ‘bothering’ his secretaries or George Washington, for that matter, repeatedly impregnating Arianna Carter and Caroline Branham; it was in their nature. More recently, Robert F. Kennedy Jr has ‘struggled’ with the same issues, at least according to the somewhat demur (and largely unreadable) accounts from Ms Nuzzi.

And then there’s Trump himself, who has his own highly questionable record when it comes to relations, consensual and otherwise, that frankly make Clinton's abuses of power look relatively quaint.

Perhaps it’s appropriate to leave the last words about the President’s penis to Ms. Stormy Daniels…

Although, on second thoughts, after re-reading her description, how about a song instead to wrap things up?

Here’s a short ditty from Miloš Forman’s 1979 film of Hair, a Central European who had a very keen eye for the puritantical abusdities of Americana…

All together now!

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There is, believe it or not, a link between the photo above and the current state of the ‘peace process’ in Ukraine. No, it’s not the one you think it is, Munich is NOT a policy lesson from history directly applicable to today’s crises: rather, it’s the ‘whiff of Munich’, the supposed stench of appeasement.

But permit me to begin with an effluvious detour.

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Smelly history

By chance, I was discussing olfactory history with students the other morning; that curious question of what the past smelt like.1

There have been attempts to address such queries. The former location of the Museum of London was on the edge of the City, perched atop the old city walls. I recall it used to have a walk-through recreation of the Victorian Docks — complete with a pub and added ‘smell’.

At best, it was a slightly chemical tang, a mildly acrid twist in the air.2 I suspect it was unrelated to the ‘real’ miasma that once hung over docklands; at a minimum, it lacked the stench of raw sewage, rotting fish, tobacco smoke, and stevedore sweat.

It wasn’t a total success, but at least they had made an effort.

A lackadaisical diktat.

No such effort is identifiable in the 28-point peace plan for Ukraine announced by Moscow and Washington in recent days. At the time of writing, it’s now down to 19 points, and it may or may not have been originally drafted by the Russians.

Either way, it’s a shabby document. It is wholly indicative of the limited capabilities of executive government conducted by estate agents and entrepreneurs playing at international relations. Apparently, Donald Trump’s special envoy, Steve Witkoff, has acquired the moniker Dim Philby, which seems apt, if also a somewhat cruel dunk upon the original (traitorous) Kim.3

Greater minds than mine have deconstructed and eviscerated the document. While lesser minds than mine have applauded President Trump’s commitment to peace and for ‘getting the ball rolling, ’ the latter are easy to spot because they always insert queries about whether anyone else has any ‘better ideas’ into their insipid spiels.

If there is any appeasement going on here, it is of Trump and his ilk, not of Putin and his, but that simple fact seems to have been overlooked.

Sadly, I suspect the Ukrainian authorities and their people will be forced to engage with this missive whether they like it or not. I hope the Ukrainians will be brought (or will bring themselves) to the table to renegotiate terms, which is where they should have been at the outset.

But wishing for something will not necessarily make it so. Not least, as after the American-Israeli ‘peace’ was concluded without Palestinian involvement, it’s no surprise this process has now been repeated. And yes, there is a linkage between the two cases, especially if you’re going to claim a shared legacy of ‘postcolonialism’.

After all, if you tolerate that, then your children will be next…

The old lament of “O nás, bez nás” (“About us, without us”) is back, and it’s as malodorous as it ever was. Especially since most references to the Munich Agreement I’ve read continue to strip away any agency from the Czechoslovaks themselves and are always monomanically focused on London, Berlin and Moscow, never Prague, Warsaw or Budapest.4

“But what does appeasement actually smell like, and why is that relevant?” I hear you ask, well, let me explain:

Ben and Maggie and the Whiff of Munich

By this stage, some readers might be wondering what the hell I am on about, but the smell of appeasement is no idle curiosity; it is frequently referenced and referred to.5

Two days before the Russian invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022, the then British Secretary of State for Defence Ben Wallace was interviewed by the Sunday Times. He referred to the ‘whiff of Munich’ emanating from certain European capitals.6

Ben’s statement was presumably directed at the leadership in Berlin and Paris. His comment explicitly conjured up a simplistic vision of ‘Munich’. Only hard power offered any deterrent to Moscow’s aggression,7 because Russia only understands the ‘language of force’.

More to the point, his reference to Munich was never meant to serve as a historical analogy, as an actual policy ‘ lesson from history’, but rather it was designed to shut down all discussion, an emotive trigger to silence the mere mention of negotiation. More war-war, less jaw-jaw.

No, I am not advocating capitulation in the face of illegal invasion, but, with a nod to Rosa Brooks, the idea that military might is always the best solution deserves to be challenged. Especially since any reference to Munich and appeasement always results in a policy that is a call to arms: it always was, and it is still.

I do not give Wallace much credit for originality. As is so often the case with Conservative Ministers, Ben was merely channelling the energy of ‘The Maggie’, the sexualised ghost of their beloved Churchillian dominatrix.

Back in October 1990, on the eve of the ‘First Gulf War’, heralding 30-plus years of murderous meddling in Mesopotamia,8 the following exchange took place in the House of Commons between Mr Andrew Faulds, Labour MP, and the Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher:

Mr. Faulds:

There is everything to negotiate about, you stupid woman—

Mr. Speaker:

Order.

Mr. Faulds:

You stupid, negative woman.

The Prime Minister:

I seem to smell the stench of appeasement in the air—the rather nauseating stench of appeasement.

The United Nations has clearly said that Iraq must come out of Kuwait—

Mr. Faulds

Have your war. You would love a war. You love war.9

While I don’t think Mr Faulds is necessarily a good role model, and I’ve never taken Thatcher as one, what is apparent, however, is that same spirit of Munich, which Anthony Eden directed at Gamal Abdel Nasser in 1956, calling him a new Hitler, or that was directed at Saddam Hussein in 2003, marches on.

“We don’t talk to dictators!” They lie in unison, as yet another tin-pot tyrant comes around for tea.

It’s the hypocrisy, see? It’s indecent, and we know you’re lying.

I repeat: this is not to suggest capitulation in the face of aggression. Rather, I want to stress that the example of Munich is not the historical lesson some believe it to be, and you shouldn’t be using it.

It’s not 1938 all over again, and it doesn’t even smell the same.

To return to the photo

I don’t know what Adolf Hitler smelled like [see photo at start], nor, for that matter, the aroma of Neville Chamberlain10 (Although I’ve read accounts about Trump’s aroma, the veracity of which I cannot confirm), presumably with the latter it was something redolent of a starched Brummie primness, and of pomade.

Smell, and smells were undoubtedly part of Chamberlain’s journey to Munich in 1938: the airfield at Heston; the interior of the Lockheed Model 10 Electra in which he travelled; the accommodation in which he stayed, or the rooms of the Führerbau where the talks took place. There is an olfactory history to be reconstructed, a ‘smellorama’ of appeasement, yet to be written.

The genuine whiff of Munich

Fortunately, we already have an account of the genuine smell of 1930s Munich, from Patrick Leigh Fermor, part of his epic overland journey to Istanbul. As he walked into Munich’s Hofbräuhaus in January 1934, passing a Brownshirt vomiting over the front building’s steps, he noted:

The vaults of the great chamber faded into infinity through blue strata of smoke. Hobnails grated, mugs clashed and the combined smell of beer and bodies and old clothes and farmyards sprang at the newcomer. I squeezed in at a table full of peasants, and was soon lifting one of those masskrugs to my lips...11

So there we have it, the authentic fragrance of Munich: tobacco smoke, vomit, fascists, peasants and beer.

The smell of victory

And what, you might ask, does victory smell like?

To answer that question, we must turn to Lieutenant Colonel Bill Kilgore:

Kilgore:

Smell that? You smell that?

Lance:

What?

Kilgore:

Napalm, son. Nothing else in the world smells like that. I love the smell of napalm in the morning. You know, one time we had a hill bombed, for 12 hours. When it was all over, I walked up. We didn’t find one of ‘em, not one stinkin’ dink body. The smell, you know that gasoline smell? The whole hill. Smelled like... victory. Someday this war’s gonna end.12

So, jellied gasoline and seared flesh.

I’ll conclude by admitting, yet again, that I have no idea how the war in Ukraine will end, I hope it will, and the invader is vanquished. Though this might not happen soon, the death toll will increase, as it also does in Gaza and Sudan.

I’m no pacifist, but I can’t help thinking sacking 2000 diplomats at the FCDO is not the right response, nor is bringing defence spending up to 5% of GDP. Instead, I’ll confess a naive belief in the restoration of the ‘rules-based international order,’ but that policy requires dialogue, a talking cure.

There are lessons to be learnt from the awfulness of the Munich Agreement and from appeasement, but if the suggested policy outcomes are always, ‘War is everything, and everything must be war’, we have a major problem on our hands.

I’ll leave the final words to a poet, Seamus Heaney:

It is difficult at times to repress the thought that history is about as instructive as an abattoir; that Tacitus was right and that peace is merely the desolation left behind after the decisive operations of merciless power.13

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I struggled to finish Chris Heath’s new book.

On at least three occasions, I thought I’d just stop and read something else. Anything else. That’s no reflection on his work; rather, it was down to the unrelenting horrors contained in the text. I expect no rewards for having finished its 650 pages, but it did make me consider the weighty toll of the events he engages with, the repercussions of which are neither settled, accepted, nor, as he details, yet fully comprehended.

What emerges from No Road Leading Back (a reference to song lyrics of the time), is his frequent questioning of what he thinks he knows of these events, what we think we know, and what we can never know. For that insight, at least, I am glad I made it to the end of what was decade long obsession for him. Heath’s honest engagement with the unknowable is also arguably what sets this book apart from those tomes that proclaim to have uncovered the hidden truth (singular), or claim to ‘know the truth’ via some quasi-miraculous process of geopolitical or genetic osmosis.1

The book is not without its faults; it gets a little bitsy towards the end, but his acknowledgment of the unknowingness2 of epistemology is impressive, and humbling. A lesson that historians, and those interested in history, would be advised to judiciously consider. No, he’s by no means the only person to tackle such reconsiderations but he’s a notable recent addition to the roster.

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Heath’s book deals with the mass murder of around 100,000 human beings in the woods outside Vilnius, Lithuania, in 1941,3 and the subsequent Nazi German attempts to conceal this crime. Two years later 80 concentration camp inmates were forced to disinter the bodies and burn them en masse (1000s at a time) on pyres. Remarkably, these inmates dug a tunnel out of the pit in which they were forced to ‘live’, and a handful managed to escape (correctly assuming they’d all be murdered once their task was complete). Twelve of the 80 got out, survived the war, and recounted their stories — or rather gave multiple, contradictory accounts — for posterity. The book tackles the original crimes, its victims, the consequences and the subsequent ‘patchy’ (yet often dedicated) memorialisation of the killing sites.

Heath does far more than simply tell the tale, and crafts a sophisticated exploration of memory, commemoration, obfuscation, mystery and outright denial. Interestingly, and probably rightly, the perpetrators of these crimes, Nazi Germans and their Lithuanian collaborators, figure only periodically in the text. For example, we never learn the name of the Nazi officer in command of the later ‘clean up’ operations, and we’re none the poorer for it.

Oh and something else…Many, many moons ago, my friend Ethan Casey gave a talk to my students about the importance of “getting the sniff on the ground” when he was a journalist covering Thailand, Haiti, and later Pakistan (he’ll correct me if I’ve gotten the chronology wrong here). Getting that ‘sniff on the ground’ attains new meanings in Heath’s book, where his frequent visits to the killing sites in Ponar4 lends the work an authenticity, as well as a disturbing olfactory dimension. I don’t know what the smell of a killing field is like, and I hope I never find out, but I will think about the nature of that stench for a very long time to come.

I have no intention of writing a full review of the book; Neal Acherson has already done so at the NYRB, and I cannot see how I can improve on his version. Instead I’d recommend you buy it and read it. It’s hard going but there are some faint rays of hope at the end of the tunnel.

Other sites of slaughter, and other deaths forgotten

It was Acherson’s review that altered me to Heath’s book, and I couldn’t help but notice two other recent reviews on similar themes. By happenstance I’ve read them all. The first, by Kim Wagner deals with another ‘forgotten’ mass murder5 in the Philippines in 1906; the second, by Philippe Sands, considers the legal consequences, or lack thereof, to those who’ve committed murder, torture and genocide.

I should add that the supposed connection between these three book are mine alone, and are perhaps thinner than I’d like, but they do exist.

Kim Wagner’s excellent book focuses on the 1906 killings of Moro ‘insurgents’ in the aftermath of the Philippine-American War (1899–1902). Unlike with the case of Ponar, the victims at Bud Dajo, on Jolo in the Sulu archipelago, were photographed alongside the perpetrators of their demise. The Nazis in Ponar were more circumspect, though less so elsewhere.6 As Wagner recounts there was little shame, at least to start with, in defending the ramparts of ‘Western Civilisation’ against the Barbarians and then proudly photographing the results. This was a ‘good fight’ after all, so what was there to be ashamed of?7

Some semblances of shame did develop, and the ‘posed’ photos and postcards of the murdered Moro faded from public memory, while the ‘hard work’ of the US soldiers was commemorated. Wagner traces the legacy of these photos, of the responsible photographer and of their apologists, before travelling to the volcanic crater on Jolo to talk with relatives, and to walk the site himself. There are obvious parallels here to Heath’s pacing of the ground in Ponar. Visiting a site does not automatically translate into profound insights, but in this text ‘getting the sniff on the ground’ again proves its value.8

Wagner offers further insights about the ongoing relevance of such historic slaughters to the our understanding of the fundamental brutality of counterinsurgency, right up to the (already much forgotten) GWOT [you do still remember that acronym, RIGHT?]9 He argues, cogently, that there are connections between the colonial atrocities of the Nineteenth century, the industrial slaughter of the Twentieth, and the digitalised techno-murder of the Twenty-First. Again, he’s not the first to point this out but these are linkages worth dwelling on.

The fanciful notion that humanity has somehow evolved over this period are easily disproven; believing that death by drone, or by smart missile is more precise, more humane, or more moral are soon undermined by contemporaneous accounts of sexual violence, ecocide, the obliteration of cities, the killing of children, beheadings, scalpings, and starvation; all of which are now dutifully recorded in high definition video and accessible via smartphone.10

It should be apparent the perpetration of such atrocities, the subsequent ‘forgetting’ or (mis)remembering of them are not simply matters for historians, they’re pressing, present day issues in Gaza, Sudan and Ukraine — the difference being, or at least we might suppose, is that post-1945 we imagine the guilty will (eventually) be held to account.

Justice undelivered

This is where Phillippe Sands (international lawyer and best selling author ), in the last of his trilogy of books concerning Nazi atrocities, the law and justice,11 puts a damper on our expectations. ( There’s a review of Sands’s book in the NYRB by the playwright Ariel Dorfman, so there’s little point in trying to compete with that.)

Sands’s tableaux opens with twin figures: General Augusto Pinochet and former SS Colonel Walther Rauff. The first was arrested in London at 11:00 PM on 16 October, 1998 for crimes committed during and after the 1973 coup in Chile; the second, Rauff, helped design of the Nazi Germany’s mobile gas-vans — a technological advancement from the earlier holocaust of bullets, as at Ponar, towards fully industrialised genocide — then escaped from Europe in 1945 and ended up working at a crab cannery in Punta Arenas, Chile.

Neither ever faced justice for the crimes they committed. West Germany attempted to prosecute Rauff in the 1960s, which failed (neatly ignoring that he’d worked for Federal Intelligence Service of West Germany for years); and Pinochet was placed under house arrest in London for 17 months waiting for extradition to Spain, a process which was eventually stymied by the British Government, who sent him home.

Moreover, as Sands explores through the second half of his book, it seems highly likely Pinochet had turned to his old comrade Rauff to help in the fight against communism in the 1970s. Rauff allegedly gave advice on how to build internment camps, how to torture, and how to dispose of the regime’s victims. While the exact nature of Rauff’s assistance for the Chilean secret police, the Dirección de Inteligencia Nacional (DINA), and in setting up Operation Condor, remains disputed, Sands judiciously weighs up the evidence and he decides it was highly likely he was involved.

There’s a final connection that links all three books, the genocide of the indigenous populations of Tierra del Fuego, the Selkʼnam. The last of whom were hunted down, or deported to Dawson Island, which is where Rauff helped the Pinochet regime to build a concentration camp, modeled along Nazi lines.

Either way, at the very minimum this is yet another example of how the Cold War’s ‘good fight’ recycled Nazi methods, which themselves owed much to colonial methods of ‘management’ of recalcitrant ‘natives’, and all of which persist to the present day.

I suppose might be overstating the linkages between the slaughters committed in tropical forests, in northern European woodlands and on South American plains and islands, but surely the key point is prevent them slipping from our memories and these three books leave their mark.

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My summer was less rounded by a sleep as topped and tailed by Martinis: the first [above left] downed in a sweltering London, the second [on the right] consumed in a cooler, and damper Helsinki. Both were excellent, as was the company, although sadly, the Library Bar at the Hotel Kämp is currently undergoing renovation, so an alternative venue had been crafted by a side entrance, no longer facing the Esplanade, which was not quite as impressive as the drinks.

To quote Ogden Nash,

There is something about a Martini,
A tingle remarkably pleasant;
A yellow, a mellow Martini;
I wish I had one at present.1

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To fair, as I write this, it’s a bit early to be thinking about Martinis; but the way the world is going, especially the seemingly endless litany of horror and despair, I find myself frequently thinking about the potential benefits of day-drinking. Yes, I know that sort of behaviour is neither appropriate nor any sort of a solution; though at least it’s still an occasional option and a source of some small respite. (Having recently read Tom Hiney’s biography of Raymond Chandler, and watched Charlie Sheen self-serving account of his surviving himself, any descent into substance addiction is clearly “no way to go through life”.)

I had started writing this Blog, as I will insist on calling it, mainly for my own amusement, and over the past 12 months or so, I have written a couple of dozen pieces. I’d thought I’d continue this summer, but found I’d lost much of my enthusiasm for doing so, in part because of Substack’s willingness to countenance writings emanating from the extreme right wing, or as The Atlantic put it back in 2023: Substack Has a Nazi Problem. A statement which, of course, reminded me of the Sobchak Doctrine, “Nihilists! Fuck me. I mean, say what you want about the tenets of National Socialism, Dude, at least it’s an ethos.”

I knew that, and I know that many writers have moved on or migrated to other platforms, and, to be honest, I still might do. Yet there seems to be a preponderance of intelligent, well-written and thoughtful work which is published on here. This leaves me a in bit of quandary, to continue to write on a platform that hosts groups and people who’s views I find highly objectionable and offensive, or to leave…

This is of course a three Martini lunch problem…but for the moment I’ll stay, and continue to shore up some fragments against our common ruin, like olive stones piled up next to empty glasses.

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Airports are rarely pleasant places, even at the best of times; some are downright horrible and collectively their only redeeming feature is taking their leave and flying off somewhere else.

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I currently find myself with three hours to kill in Helsinki, and to be fair it’s not half bad. Or rather I should qualify that by saying it’s not half bad on a Saturday afternoon in June. Can’t say the same about cold dark, late nights in December when everything’s shut and the place is empty. Basically I’ve spent an inordinate amount of time hanging around the terminal here over past decade or so, usually en route for Tallinn, Estonia.

The experience must all be very different if you’re travelling First Class, but for the rest of us the experience of air travel is no longer exciting nor romantic, it’s mainly just annoying and frustrating. So it is nice to be able to say something vaguely positive about the experience. Having recently crisscrossed France by train, eight hours each way, it wasn’t massively preferable — though the views out the windows were excellent.

To be honest I don’t recall my first visit to an airport, as I must have been all of three months old; but I’ve been to a fair few since then. Not sure Helsinki is my favourite airport of all time…but compared to hellholes like Heathrow or Frankfurt it’s a delight…Tallinn airport is lovely, small and a breeze to sail through. I have fond memories of Sydney and Hong Kong (mainly because of the food on offer); of small Caribbean airstrips on clifftops and seaplane harbors serving crappy instant coffee.

I even have vague reallocations of a hurried exit from François Duvalier International Airport under gunfire, but only vague due to the consumption of one too many daiquiris.

So while I am here, what’s good about Helsinki?

Well, it’s light and airy and pretty well laid out after it’s most recent renovation. Because it’s a hub for China, Japan and South Korea there are some OKish ramen places, there a forest chill out hall with bird noises, lots of seats, play areas for kids, and even a pub with an outside terrace. The latter might not sound much, but the ability to breath ‘fresh’ air for a while is rare, and should be widely replicated.

On the downside it is horrifically expensive. There are a range of restaurants and shops selling food of various descriptions, but the prices are eye watering. There a Jamie's Deli, a remnant of Jamie Oliver’s restaurant empire and it sells 2 mangey looking pieces of pizza for fifteen Euro. No, I haven’t tried it and I’m not planning to.

There are also, unsurprisingly given the location, a Moomins restaurant and Santa’s grotto, ooh and they sell whole reindeer skins for like 200 Euro…not sure what you’d do with one, nor have I ever seen anyone buy one…but if that’s what you’re looking for, Helsinki airport is the place for you…

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A friend recommended I read Agustina Bazterrica’s Tender is the Flesh (2017), which I did; I remain somewhat traumatised by it.1 There’s a scene towards the end of Mad Heidi that reminded me of the more disturbing aspects of Bazterrica’s cannibal-flavoured tale. Admittedly, unlike the novel, the film didn’t involve the consumption of human flesh but rather the forced production of zombie-inducing Swiss cheese from enslaved women’s breast milk, and the pitiless abuse of the lactose intolerant.

I suppose some readers might find these subjects unsuitable for mirth-making, which is probably not an unreasonable position to take on such issues, although it was all done “in the best possible taste”.

Conversely, there were no overt references to cannibalism, breasts, nor, so far as I recall, to cheese in Guy Richies’s latest derivative outing for Apple TV. Instead, it’s a rip-roaring, and perfectly serviceable National Treasure franchise rip-off, starring John Krasinski and Natalie Portman, and including a nod to the legend that is Clive Cussler’s Dirk Pitt.2

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Processed cheese

Like many people these days, I actively seek out bland, lightweight entertainment in the evenings, especially after a long day scrolling in the doom mines. The sheer gore-dripping horror of so much of the news leaves me craving more restorative fare. The latest series of White Lotus and The Residence were both enjoyable, and, for much of the year, I’ve been working through Veep (2012-19), which I’d somehow missed.3

The two films mentioned above thus offered a quantum of solace to the daily grim litany of incompetence, greed, murder, mayhem, and a general absence of decency.4

Well, sort of…

Cheese-fueled machinery of hate.

*Spoilers ahoy!*

I feel obliged to try and attempt to explain Mad Heidi’s ‘plot’ (the word plot is doing a lot of heavy lifting here): in a nutshell; Heidi (Alice Lucy) fights for Swiss freedom from the cheese-making (ultra-processed) dictator, Hermann Meili (Casper Van Dien), whose troops killed her parents, and her goat-cheese dealing boyfriend, Goat-Peter; she’s then imprisoned, destined to fight to the death in a (Swiss) wrestling ring; Heidi escapes, drinks magical Absinthe, gets trained by Ninja Nuns, leads a resistance army and wins the day…killing Meili through the rectal insertion of a high-pressure pipe of hot, liquified cheese, which causes his head to explode.

Phew, I think I’ve covered it all.

This is a deeply silly film with limited artistic merit, but that is not necessarily a criticism; rather, it’s a statement of fact. You either like that sort of thing for around 80 minutes or you don’t. But have no illusions. Not least as it was made by the same producer who gave the world Iron Sky (2012), so if you liked that, you’ll probably like this. If you didn’t, then I would avoid Heidi like the plague.

I am struggling to think if there’s anything political in the film? Admittedly, it’s about a repressive dictator with a fondness [Fondue? Ed.] for ultra-processed food, but that’s about it. Van Dien makes a nod or two to his earlier roles in Starship Troopers, but Heidi’s director lacks Paul Verhoeven’s visceral understanding of fascism.

Aggressive nipples

For reasons I could not at first understand, President Meili’s assistant/servant spends all her on-screen time topless, displaying her, what I can only describe as, highly aggressive nipples. Again, Verhoeven comes to mind with his tasteless-breast-fest Showgirls (1995), but Heidi is a horror film with little nudity or titillation, so the comparison only goes so far.5

According to IMDB, the actor is Milo Moiré, a name that rang a vague cowbell at the back of my mind. Ms. Moiré is, or perhaps was, a “Swiss conceptual artist who produces nude performances and uses her body in her art”, and now seems to have a career on Swiss TV.

Quite how one progresses from being a conceptual artist to a non-talking topless role in a crowd-funded Swissploitation flick is anyone’s guess. Still, I briefly wondered if her stance alluded to a possible feminist subtext in the film, but I suspect the answer is a hard no.

Of course, you might argue this is exactly what you’d expect from an 'exploitation’ film, and I did wonder if Ms Moiré is the one being exploited here? I’m not sure. At the very least her role (and that of the Heidi herself) were wasted opportunities, especially given the strength of the female characters portrayed in recent offering such as: The Substance (2024), Blink Twice (2024) and Drive Away Dolls (2024); or Uzo Aduba’s barnstorming performance in The Residence.

Perhaps I expected too much from Mad Heidi, and wasn’t there a William Tell film at some point too? Given the violent use of a Toblerone bar at one juncture, I presume we can look forward to an epic biopic tracing the snack’s historic development.

Anyway, moving on from processed cheese to recycled water.

Richie waters

As of late, Guy Richie has morphed into a one-man content machine, pumping out a dizzying array of films and TV series across multiple platforms. The quality of the Richie canon varies greatly: from the joyously incompetent campness of The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare to the turgid drudgery of The Covenant (2023). Still, there are some gems in there, too.6

Richie also now flogs £75,000 BBQs, owns a pub, brews beer and has bought an airport, all of which I find confusing: I’m guessing he doesn’t need the money, so I presume he’s an adherent of Paul’s epistles to the Thessalonians (4:11) — or it’s all about tax avoidance like Jeremey Clarkson’s farm.

I’d love to have been a fly on the wall for the pitch meetings for Fountain of Youth (FoY) — and I am hoping we’ll see versions of them turn up on Seth Rogen's The Studio (2025) — I suppose they must have included lots of shouted references to Indiana Jones, Tomb Raider, da Vinci Code, The Mummy, plus National Treasure and the arousing allure of a long and profitable franchise: “Billions for us all!! Hoorah! ” they doubtless cheered in unison.

In the ‘good old days’, such meetings would have been conducted in a fug in booze, cigarette smoke, cocaine, and aggressive misogyny; I suspect here it was wheatgrass smoothies, nicotine-less vapes and active wear, and yet the discussion probably proved equally vacuous. It seems the project started out with another British director, Dexter Fletcher (of Press Gang fame) at the helm and was passed on to Richie. I’ve no idea why the change occurred but I suspect there’s a good story in there.

FoY is not a bad film, but it is pure pastiche, polished pastiche maybe, but wholly unoriginal. Unlike the gleeful gross-out stupidity of Heidi this is studiously corporate affair, which exudes all the joie de vivre of bagging an upgraded suite at the Holiday Inn in Terre Haute, Indiana (with added fruit basket, semi-stale muffins and a half-bottle of non-alcoholic American wine).7

Watching the film became a tick box exercise in spotting the references they’d ripped off, and the only one I was really impressed by was to Raise the Titanic (1980). Yet, to be fair to Richie he does a lot with rather thin gruel. He’s made a solid, well paced and shot family adventure film, and that’s no mean feat.

What did catch my attention was the fact that the script was written by James Vanderbilt, one of the writers behind Zodiac (2007), in my humble opinion, one of the last great Hollywood detective movies. Vanderbilt, and yes, he does come from that family, shows little of the zip and verve of his earlier work, which is a shame. Vanderbilt is apparently now engaged in making a film about Nuremberg with “Russell Crowe as Hermann Göring…” Yes, you read that correctly. I have no idea what to make of that sentence.

*Spoilers*

As for the plot: An Irish tech billionaire who’s dying from an unspecified terminal cancer, Owen Carver (Domhnall Gleeson), finances a search for the mythical Fountain of Youth in order to escape death. He hires a crack team of ‘treasure hunters’ led by Krasinski’s Luke Purdue [a nod to the infamous opioid dealing company?] to track down clues in old master’s paintings, and a bible to the location of the fountain. They’re opposed by equally crack team of Protectors of the Path who wish to keep the location secret because…stuff ( I am not quite sure what stuff) led by Eiza González. Purdue ropes in his sister (Natalie Portman) because she’s the head curator at the National Gallery and her son, and they all head off to the middle of ocean to raise the Lusitania, then on to Vienna, and finally to the pyramids where, fairly obviously the fountain is located. The twist is Carver isn’t ill, but is a baddie who wants to abuse the fountains powers for evil, but he dies horribly and all the goodies escape ready for the sequel.

That said, it was all fairly watchable, which given the quality of some recent films made by Netflix, Apple, and Amazon films is saying something. The opening chase in Bangkok is effectively handled, as is the heist in the National Gallery and the ensuing car chase in Liverpool (yes, I noticed). It chugs along quite nicely when there’s action on screen, less so with plot development and dialogue. The shoot out at the end is poor, but everyone is exceedingly well dressed most of the time, so there’s that going for it.

Titanic/Abyss.

The best bit of the film for me was the shameless ripping off the 1980s Cold War turkey, Raise the Titanic, based on Clive Cussler’s series of Dirk Pitt adventure novels. The Lusitania was the ship that Vanderbilt’s great-grandfather perished on, and the film's plot involves opening the Vanderbilt’s safe on the ship. All well and good, but let’s not forget that the latest Mission: Impossible film rips of James Cameron’s The Abyss (1989). I do wonder if they think we won’t notice these similarities, or perhaps they just don’t care?

There is however a warning for the producers here, multiple attempts have been made to launch a viable Dirk Pitt series, most recently with 2005’s Sahara, with Matthew McConaughey, Penélope Cruz, and Steve Zahn, which I quite liked but seems to have descended into bitter legal recriminations effectively curtailing any future Pitt films.

Will there be more FoY films from Apple? There could be, and long running franchises can emerge from relatively humble beginnings, although I think I’m more likely to watch Heidi 2: Fondue of Filth than Fountain of Youth 2: Water Sports.

That’s all for now.

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This is not so much a brand new posting, but rather a revision and reworking of something I wrote on here last summer about Candace Owens and her peculiar obsession with the Second World War.

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I’ve rewritten that post and it’s now been published on the Frontiers of American Reaction section of the Illiberalism Studies Program At George Washington University.

It’s freely available and the link is below:

Martin D. Brown (@martindbbrown.bsky.social) on the right-wing influencer Candace Owens, her forays into "hidden" histories, and the costs of the right's attack on epistemology.

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I was in the pub when President Volodymyr Oleksandrovych Zelenskyy met with US President Donald Trump and Vice-President J.D. Vance in the Oval Office on 28 February 2025. I took a few hours out from the endless horror show of the news cycle to enjoy an afternoon in the weakly warm sunshine with friends. Sadly, the current pace of events waits for no man and his pint. It was only late last night that I caught up with the breaking news.

The footage speaks for itself. Trump and Vance shouted down and humiliated the Ukrainian president in public, throwing him out of the White House. I won’t patronise readers by adding anything to what people can watch for themselves. Who is to blame and what will be the result is now a matter for public disputation, although I fear it is the Ukrainians who will ultimately pay the price.

At a very minimum, it was an unedifying spat which revealed the widening gap between Washington, D.C. and Kyiv. Europe will scrabble to catch up, and doubtless Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin is laughing to himself in his underground Bondian lair.

As a historian of European diplomacy, I might add that this situation is exactly why you should employ professional diplomats to negotiate and not rely on summitry. But the general confusion between diplomacy and summitry, as set out by Harold Nicolson in 1939, continues to beffudle the ill-informed.

Instead, the budgets of Foreign Ministries are being reduced, as are those of the organs of Soft Power in favour of military budgets based on meaningless percentages of GDP. To paraphrase Rosa Brooks, “everything has become war, and war has become everything, everywhere, all at once”. The narcissistic, shallow, and short-term foibles of politicians are best kept in check when dealing with ‘rules based international order’. It seems we’ve yet to learn this ‘lesson from history’.

The historical hot-takes have started up: Winston Churcill wore a boiler suit to the White House, and Trump’s bullying was akin to that suffered by Czechoslovakia's President Emil Hácha in Berlin in March 1939. The obsession among numerous commentators for contrasting recent events in Ukraine with 1930s Czechoslovakia is fascinating, but most of these comparisons fall apart on closer examination.

For what it’s worth, my mind was instead drawn to the meeting of the British Ambassador, George Macartney, 1st Earl Macartney, with the Chinese Emperor, Gaozong of Qing, in 1792. An event detailed in Stephen Platt’s wonderful book Imperial Twilight.

Of course, the question is, and I am not sure I quite yet know the answer, who here is the Emperor and who the Ambassador, and who ‘should’ have kowtowed to whom. Who now is the rising power and which the declining? In the short term, the British paid for the Ambassador’s refusal to prostrate himself before the son of heaven, but in the longer term, this event was to mark the beginning of the end of Chinese dominance over its lands.

I have no idea how this will play out, but I suspect we should all prepare for the option we dislike the most.

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