Couples who publicly kiss are jailed, yet the state turns a blind eye to 30,000 imported prostitutes.

William Butler in The Observer:

This was not Amsterdam's red-light district or the Reeperbahn in Hamburg or a bar on Shanghai's Bund. This was in the city centre of Dubai, the Gulf emirate where western women get a month in prison for a peck on the cheek; the Islamic city on Muhammad's peninsula where the muezzin's call rings out five times a day drawing believers to prayer; where public consumption of alcohol prompts immediate arrest; where adultery is an imprisonable offence; and where mall shoppers are advised against “overt displays of affection”, such as kissing.

Ayman Najafi and Charlotte Adams, the couple recently banged up in Al Awir desert prison for a brief public snog, must have been very unlucky indeed, because in reality Dubai is a heaving maelstrom of sexual activity that would make the hair stand up on even the most worldly westerner's head. It is known by some residents as “Sodom-sur-Mer”.

Beach life, cafe society, glamorous lifestyles, fast cars and deep tans are all things associated with “romance” in the fog-chilled minds of Europeans and North Americans. And there is a fair amount of legitimate “romance” in Dubai. Western girls fall for handsome, flash Lebanese men; male visitors go for the dusky charms of women from virtually anywhere. Office and beach affairs are common.

But most of the “romance” in Dubai is paid-for sex, accepted by expatriates as the norm, and to which a blind eye is turned – at the very least – by the authorities.

More here.

Sasha Polakow-Suransky in The Boston Globe:

“I think this is a very big deal,” President Clinton declared to a group of American Jews and Arabs after the legions of photographers left the White House grounds on Sept. 13, 1993. However, Clinton warned, it would take commitment and hard work to guarantee that the historic Israeli-Palestinian Accord signed that day would “truly be a turning point.” It has been almost 17 years since Yasir Arafat and Yitzhak Rabin shook hands in the White House Rose Garden, setting in motion a process that was supposed to end the conflict for good. The agreement Clinton envisioned was relatively simple: Two states for two peoples. Israel would largely withdraw from the territories it has occupied since 1967, while retaining a few large settlement blocs within the West Bank and compensating the Palestinians with a similar amount of land from Israel proper. This two-state solution respects the fundamental tenets of Zionism — by allowing Israel to remain a Jewish-majority state — and satisfies moderate Palestinians’ nationalist ambitions by creating a national home for 4 million stateless Palestinians. It has guided western policy ever since.

But the two-state solution has not worked, and there is a growing fear that it never will, despite the resumption last week of indirect talks. Israel withdrew from the Gaza Strip in 2005 only to see the Islamic fundamentalist party Hamas take control of it, sending rockets into Israeli cities across the border. Meanwhile, Israel has continued to expand settlements in the West Bank, making the possibility of a territorially contiguous Palestine seem more remote than ever. With over 300,000 settlers in the West Bank today — compared to just over 100,000 in 1993 — many analysts on both sides believe that the settlements have become too entrenched and inextricably tied to Israel proper for the government to realistically evacuate all or most of its citizens, even if Israeli forces withdraw. Still, because negotiators on both sides and officials in Washington are so well-versed in two-state diplomacy and have been working for years to bring such a solution about, it remains the default option even as logistics conspire to make it impossible.

More here.

John Allen Paulos in The New York Times:

In the realm of public policy, we live in an age of numbers. To hold teachers accountable, we examine their students’ test scores. To improve medical care, we quantify the effectiveness of different treatments. There is much to be said for such efforts, which are often backed by cutting-edge reformers. But do wehold an outsize belief in our ability to gauge complex phenomena, measure outcomes and come up with compelling numerical evidence? A well-known quotation usually attributed to Einstein is “Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.” I’d amend it to a less eloquent, more prosaic statement: Unless we know how things are counted, we don’t know if it’s wise to count on the numbers.

The problem isn’t with statistical tests themselves but with what we do before and after we run them. First, we count if we can, but counting depends a great deal on previous assumptions about categorization. Consider, for example, the number of homeless people in Philadelphia, or the number of battered women in Atlanta, or the number of suicides in Denver. Is someone homeless if he’s unemployed and living with his brother’s family temporarily? Do we require that a women self-identify as battered to count her as such? If a person starts drinking day in and day out after a cancer diagnosis and dies from acute cirrhosis, did he kill himself? The answers to such questions significantly affect the count.

More here.

Richard C. Lewontin reviews Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini's What Darwin Got Wrong, in the NYRB:

e appearance of Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini’s book at this time and the rhetoric and structure of its argument are guaranteed to provoke as strong a negative reaction in the community of evolutionary biologists as they have among philosophers of biology. To a degree never before experienced by the current generation of students of evolution, evolutionary theory is under attack by powerful forces of religious fundamentalism using the ambiguity of the word “theory” to suggest that evolution as a natural process is “only a theory.” While What Darwin Got Wrong may have been designed pour épater les bourgeois and to forcibly get the attention of evolutionists, when two accomplished intellectuals make the statement “Darwin’s theory of selection is empty,” they generate an anger that makes it almost impossible for biologists to give serious consideration to their argument.

Conscious that Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini may have overdone it, they have circulated an essay that assures evolutionary biologists that they are not challenging the basic mechanism of evolution as a natural process described by the four principles of variation, heredity, differential reproduction, and mutation. In particular, they reject any notion that natural selection is some sort of “force” with laws like gravitation. For them, natural selection is simply a name for the differential reproduction of different kinds in a population. Not to be misunderstood, perhaps biologists should stop referring to “natural selection,” and instead talk about differential rates of survival and reproduction.

The other source of anxiety and anger is that the argument made by Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini strikes at the way in which evolutionary biologists provide adaptive natural historical explanations for a vast array of phenomena, as well as the use by a wider scholarly community of the metaphor of natural selection to provide theories of history, social structure, human psychological phenomena, and culture. If you make a living by inventing scenarios of how natural selection produced, say, xenophobia and racism or the love of music, you will not take kindly to the book.

Even biologists who have made fundamental contributions to our understanding of what the actual genetic changes are in the evolution of species cannot resist the temptation to defend evolution against its know-nothing enemies by appealing to the fact that biologists are always able to provide plausible scenarios for evolution by natural selection. But plausibility is not science. True and sufficient explanations of particular examples of evolution are extremely hard to arrive at because we do not have world enough and time.

S.C. Kavassalis over at The Language of Bad Physics:

Ada Lovelace Day celebrates the life and achievements of women in science and technology through blogging in the name of Ada Byron – Countess of Lovelace, daughter of the romantic poet Lord Byron, analyst, metaphysician, the founder of scientific computing, and The Enchantress of Numbers.

In honour of Ada Lovelace Day, I’ll briefly profile the life of one of the most important women in the history of science and mathematics, born March 23rd, Emmy Noether, her brilliant (first) theorem, and how, perhaps surprisingly, there is still room for debate and discussion on it’s applicability today.

Emmy Noether (March 23rd, 1882 – April 14th, 1935)

“My methods are really methods of working and thinking; this is why they have crept in everywhere anonymously.”

Amalie Emmy Noether was a German born, Jewish mathematician who is known for her fundamental contributions to the study of algebraic structures and considered by many to be the most important woman in the history of mathematics.

Born in Erlangen, the daughter of the noted mathematician Max Noether, Emmy studied mathematics at the University of Erlangen, completing her dissertation in 1907 with Paul Albert Gordan at the Mathematical Institute of Erlangen. In 1915, David Hilbert and Felix Klein invited her to join the mathematics department at the University of Göttingen despite the objections of the philosophical faculty there. Her seven years at the Mathematical Institute of Erlangen were spent unpaid and she had to spend four years lecturing at the University of Göttingen under Hilbert’s name. Despite this, her Habilitation process was approved in 1919 allowing her to obtain the rank of Privatdozent. She remained in Göttingen until 1933 as a leading member of the mathematical community, where her students were sometimes known as the “Noether boys”. Noether’s First Theorem

First proved in 1915 and published in 1918, Emmy Noether’s First Theorem gives a profound connection between continuous symmetries and conservation laws for certain classes of theories. The familiar consequences of Noether’s Theorem are that space translational symmetry gives us conservation of momentum, rotational symmetry gives us conservation of angular momentum, time translational symmetry gives us conservation of energy, etc.

Sam Anderson in New York Magazine:

Martin Amis’s new novel, The Pregnant Widow, is—nakedly, brazenly, devotedly—about sex. This makes it almost unique in the Amis canon. It’s not a Gulag novel that turns out to be about sex, or a nuclear-war novel that turns out to be about sex, or a Holocaust novel that turns out to be about sex. It’s a sex novel about sex. That directness is strangely liberating, both for the reader and, it seems, for Amis. The frankness makes him look, paradoxically, a little less pervy: He’s not trying to sneak sex in under the guise of high-minded geopolitical hand-wringing—apocalyptic dread as sublimated desire for the forbidden pleasures of anal sex. He’s just being flat-out dirty. He can finally revel openly, without smoke screens, in the richest comic material the human race has yet to discover: breasts, penises, fluids, orifices, costumes, positions, body types, hand jobs, teasing, ogling—the whole titillating tragicomedy of carnal desire. It’s like a master-class for all the young male novelists (Eggers, Kunkel, Chabon) that Katie Roiphe accused, in a recent Times Book Review essay, of being squeamish about sex. The result is Amis’s best book in fifteen years and (at least for 75 percent of it) a nearly perfect comic novel.

This resurgence comes at a very good time, just as some Amis fans (if you’ll allow me to get autobiographical) were beginning to give up hope. Amis’s career has been in a well-publicized gentle decline since 1995, when he published The Information. Since then, his novels—Night Train, Yellow Dog, House of Meetings—have been sparse and middling; his critics have been many and mean. Amis’s work—like his elder Don DeLillo’s—is so dependent on the energy of his prose that, when that energy weakens even slightly, his faults become unbearable. It’s hard to know what caused the drop-off—whether it was age (he’s now 60), the critical sniping, or the nonfictional lure of world events (his recent jousting over “Islamofascism” has sometimes seemed like a full-time career). But whatever he was doing in the five-plus years he spent agonizing over The Pregnant Widow, it worked. This reads like the work of young Amis. I picked it up reluctantly but soon found myself raving about it to everyone I know. It has me fantasizing about a Roth-like late-career creativity burst.

Latoya Peterson over at Jezebel on the new Beyoncé video, “Why Don't You Love Me”:

Beyoncé's new video for “Why Don't You Love Me” debuted last week, with a nod to 1950s homemaker style — and interesting commentary on ideas of womanhood, past and present.

Over at Feministing, Ann cast an appraising eye over Beyoncé and Sade's retro styling in recent videos. However, Ann's observations confused me a bit:

But given that these are two women of color are playing roles commonly associated with upper-middle-class white women (Betty Draper being the most recent reference point), I wondered: What makes me call this “retro”? I know there were certainly upper-middle-class women of color in the '50s and '60s, but this image of the happy-but-secretly-unhappy housewife is stereotypically white. By virtue of race, Beyonce and Sade are twisting that stereotype. (Granted, Beyonce is a more pin-up than straightforward homemaker — but hey, that's transgressive, too, as pin-up girls were almost all white.)

It is occasions like this that remind me how complete and total segregation was, and how white washed history can be. If these images are associated solely with whiteness, it's because the history of women of color has been systematically erased, deemed unworthy of inclusion in the general framework of “the way we were.” There were upper middle class black women in the 50s and 60s, even entire enclaves like Striver's Row in Harlem. However, one did not have to be upper class, or even upper middle class, to be a housewife. (Just as one did not have to be black to work as a domestic for a wealthier family.)

The archives of Jet magazine tell this story better than I can. In addition to its news and entertainment reporting, Jet published an entire Modern Living section, which was more or less dedicated to housewives in search of the latest and greatest fashions and appliances.

[H/t: Amanda Marcotte]

Until the early 19th century, visiting Italy was the sine qua non of artistic formation, whether you came from France (Ingres, Corot), Spain (Goya), England (Turner) or Germany (Schinkel). It was only when art’s unbroken line back to quattrocento classicism started to falter that the theorists moved in. Jacob Burckhardt in his 1860 book The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy was the first art historian to use and popularise the term “Renaissance”. Since then, the epoch has been all things to all men. Burckhardt, whose book remains a template, saw the Renaissance as the dawn of the spirit of individuality and of modernity. In the following years, Walter Pater in The Renaissance interpreted it through the prism of fin-de-siècle aestheticism; Freud psychoanalysed Leonardo; in the 1930s, Marxist critic Meyer Schapiro pinpointed the emergence of capitalism in the period. What we do with the Renaissance, then, defines how we see ourselves, which is why this current crop of histories is so mordantly entertaining and illuminating. Holding up a mirror to the cut-throat competition, personality cults and public display of the 21st-century art world, all are portraits of creative rivalry and power play which will be recognisable to anyone observing, to take one example, the recent face-off between Antony Gormley and Anish Kapoor over London’s Olympic commission.

more from Jackie Wullschlager at the FT here.

In Don DeLillo’s latest novel, the weirdly exciting “Point Omega,” a character is “trying to read science fiction but nothing she’d read so far could begin to match ordinary life on this planet … for sheer unimaginableness.” With another writer, you might coax an unsurprising aesthetic from this point of view: Ignore the attractions of extraterrestrials and dystopia — the way we live now is more than ample fodder for the fiction writer’s art. The catch, of course, is that DeLillo has written science fiction and written it memorably. Indeed, it’s hard to think of an SF book that does quite the same thing as “Ratner’s Star” (1976), DeLillo’s early-career masterpiece. Part omnium gatherum, part comic novel, it’s a dense, entertaining, mind-bending boomerang of a book that luxuriates in the language of math and science while spinning an elegant, big-picture critique of those fields. Though daunting in structure and scale, it’s actually one of the more traditionally coherent of DeLillo’s books, with what amounts to a perfect resolution.

more from Ed Park at the LA Times here.

Kant. Last Days

It is truly no evidence of a great soul
—O nature—
and if you aren't magnanimous
it may be you don't exist at all

Could you really not treat him to a sudden death
like a candle guttering
like a wig slipping off
like a ring's short trip on a smooth tabletop
spinning and turning
at last standing still like a dead
beetle
Why these cruel games
with an old man
loss of memory
dull awakenings
nocturnal terror
wasn't it he who said
“beware of bad dreams”
he who has a gray glacier on his head
a volcano where a pocket-watch should be

It is in terrible taste
to condemn a man
learning the trade of apparitions
suddenly to become
a ghost

by Zbigniew Herbert
from Poetry, January 2007

From Salon:

In late 2000, Wes Moore, an ex-military officer and soon-to-be Rhodes scholar, came across a series of articles in the Baltimore Sun that caught his attention. They chronicled the aftermath of a robbery gone awry: A few months earlier a group of armed men had broken into a Baltimore jewelry store, and in the process of making their escape, shot and killed an off-duty police officer named Bruce Prothero. It wasn't just the violence of the act that shocked Moore, it was the name of one of the suspects: Wes Moore. Several years later, when Moore (the Rhodes scholar) returned from his studies at Oxford, the story continued to haunt him. Here were two men with the same name, from the same city, even the same age, and two dramatically different trajectories. In the hopes of finding out why, Moore began writing and visiting the man (who had since been sentenced to life in prison). The result is “The Other Wes Moore,” Moore's vivid and richly detailed new book about both men's childhoods in Baltimore and the Bronx.

Both, as it turns out, grew up in single-parent households with working-class mothers, in neighborhoods rife with crime and drugs. But while one Wes Moore was saved from delinquency and falling grades by a transfer to a military school, the other Wes fathered several children, surrounded himself with addicts, and fell deeper and deeper into the drug trade before, eventually winding up behind bars. The book is also a call to action: It includes a glossary of vetted community organizations, and proceeds of the book will be donated to several nonprofits.

More here.

From The New York Times:

Over the past 10 years, Paul Berman has been exploring a theme: the repudiation by liberal intellectuals of their values and ideals. The theme has been elaborated in several books — “Terror and Liberalism,” “Power and the Idealists” and now “The Flight of the Intellectuals.” Berman himself is a man who identifies “with the liberal left.”

…

Berman has two targets. First, he takes on the Muslim scholar Tariq Ramadan, whom he contrasts with the admirable and courageous secularist Ayaan Hirsi Ali. (Ramadan, a professor at Oxford, was recently permitted to enter the United States after being barred for six years under the Patriot Act.) And second, Berman challenges the commentators Ian Buruma and Timothy Garton Ash for their qualified endorsements of Ramadan and their disparagements of Hirsi Ali, noting the “tone of contempt that so frequently creeps across discussions” about her, the “sneering masculine put-downs of the best-known feminist intellectual ever to come out of Africa.”

In short, Berman finds the widespread admiration of Ramadan to be misplaced. Berman regards Ramadan as a sinister figure with a sinister agenda, and at the same time deplores the intimidation and violence directed at that “subset of the European intelligentsia — its Muslim free-thinking and liberal wing especially” — who “survive only because of bodyguards.” This, Berman concludes, has been unheard of in Western Europe since the fall of the Axis. “Fear — mortal fear, the fear of getting murdered by fanatics in the grip of a bizarre ideology — has become, for a significant number of intellectuals and artists, a simple fact of modern life.”

More here.

No argument can fail to be enhanced by an Orwell quote. That's why he's become the authority of first resort for people who don't know what they're talking about.

Alastair Harper in Prospect:

Crudely put, George Orwell is anyone’s bitch. Whatever the topic, whatever the political position, he can be wheeled out in support to enunciate universal truths in a voice as compelling as the ghost in Hamlet. From voting reform to CCTV, from Trident to the debates, there’s a perfect Orwell quotation, apposite, terse and oracular, just waiting to be plucked out and flourished. I know because I’ve done it myself – writing about media interest in the death of a young British girl overseas, I used a handy line from “The Decline of the English Murder” to bolster my argument. If Saint George is with me, I need fear no controversy.

But why Orwell? Why not Dickens, George Bernard Shaw or some other safely dead and highly moral writer? Perhaps vanity has something to do with it: unlike other canonical writers, Orwell was a working hack. Take the “As I Please” essays he did for Tribune, where he talks about everything from immigration to comic books – he was no proud literary lion, but a typewriter for hire. He too would roll up his sleeves and scribble for money. Perhaps the struggling journalist invokes the saint with a faint, wistful hope that he too will be as useful to his scribbling descendants in a couple of generations.

Chiefly, though, Orwell’s ambiguity makes him useful.

More here.

Ethan Siegel in Starts With A Bang:

A couple of weeks ago, my wife and I went to the circus together. Someday, I vowed, I'll be strong, flexible, and stable enough to do the amazing hand-balancing tricks we saw. And all the while, the six-year-old girl behind us screamed her piercing, high-pitched scream, cheering the performers on. (This is totally appropriate behavior, IMO, and no children reading this should be discouraged from screaming at the circus.)

Now, one of us has better hearing than the other. And while one of us found the high pitched screaming to be a minor annoyance, the other was simply in agony. What's going on here?

It's going to take a little bit of biology and a little bit of physics to figure it out. First off: how does your ear work?

The sound waves — which are pressure waves — enter your ear and press up against the tympanic membrane, better known as your eardrum.

The vibrating eardrum causes the three little bones in there — the hammer, anvil, and stirrup, known collectively as the auditory bones — to vibrate as well. The last one, the stirrup, pushes against the cochlea, and this is where your hearing takes place. How? To get the simple answer, we need to know what the cochlea looks like on the inside?

Your cochlea is a spiral-shaped structure, like a snail's shell, that's filled with fluid and lined with tiny hairs known as cilia. The most sensitive cilia are the ones closest to the outside: only a tiny vibration is needed to set them in motion. These are also the most easily destroyed. So when you do things to damage your hearing like go to rock concerts without earplugs, listen to your headphones or stereos too loudly, fire a gun without protective gear, or have your “friend” scream in your ear, these sensitive cilia get destroyed.

The bad news? Once they're destroyed, they pretty much never grow back. So while a newborn baby can hear up to about 20,000 Hz, very few adults can. At age 31, my hearing stops somewhere around 13,000 Hz. There are a few sites out there to test your hearing, so I've stolen some sound files to allow you to find where your hearing, approximately, cuts out.

More here. [I could hear the 12KHz tone clearly, the 14K just barely, and the 15K not at all.]

Eyal Press in Foreign Policy:

Until recently, displays of disobedience in the Israeli army were mainly carried out by so-called “refuseniks” on the left who risked being branded traitors (and sent to prison) to avoid serving in the occupied territories. The refuseniks making noise today come from Israel's religious right, and they want to preserve the occupation, not end it. “Today, over a quarter of young officers wear skullcaps,”an Israeli general recently told the International Crisis Group, which devoted part of a July 2009 report to the trend. “In the combat units, their presence is two or three times their demographic weight. In the Special Forces it's even higher.”

Some of these soldiers enter the military after attending pre-army Torah colleges, state-funded preparatory schools where high school graduates enroll for one year of “spiritual fortification” before joining their peers. Others go to places like the Birkat Yosef Hesder Yeshiva, a religious academy funded by the government under a formal arrangement with the Ministry of Defense, where roughly 250 students divide their time between Torah instruction and military service over a five-year period. The first hesder yeshiva opened its doors in 1965: around 50 such institutions are spread across Israel and the West Bank today.

More here.

Cassirer was brought up on the poetry of Goethe and the anthropology of Herder, Schiller, Schelling, Hegel, and Humboldt. He shared the romantic opposition to eighteenth-century rationalism for degrading our “sensuous, emotional life to the level of a biological residue, a passive stuff to be overcome.” These thinkers defined the essence of humanity not as reason but rather our capacity for self-expression, manifest in not only science and mathematics, but also language, religion, art, and myth. The ways in which we articulate and organize the world are irreducibly plural. Cassirer learned from them that our relationship with the world is not dominated exclusively by the demand for “objective knowledge,” but must also answer to the human thirst for meaning, how we shape the world into patterns, our various activities of symbolic formation. “The critique of reason becomes, in Cassirer’s famous declaration, the critique of culture.” He did not, however, share the Romantics’ disdain for science. Rather, “Cassirer’s ultimate purpose was to reveal science as an expression of the same symbolic capacity underlying language, art, and myth, thereby acquitting it of the common charge of coldness and inhumanity. His philosophy is an attempt to exploit the ambiguous energies of German romanticism on behalf of enlightenment.”

more from Emily Grosholz at The Hudson Review here.

Serious people have been apologizing for Nathanael West since he began to write. His first novel, the story of a man who crawls into the anus of the Trojan horse and wanders its intestines, was described by Harold Bloom as “an auspicious technical essay, marred by grandiose overreaching.” Miss Lonelyhearts, his second, lacks “psychologically rounded” characters by design, Jonathan Lethem tells us. Elizabeth Hardwick called West’s third book “wasteful brilliance.” His fourth, some believe, is the best Hollywood novel ever. “[O]nce we understand that The Day of the Locust is intended as high comedy,” Norman Podhoretz wrote, “this apparently weird, disjointed book begins to assume a meaningful shape.” Behind this advocacy looms the sense that West’s pursuits are less than what a novelist’s should be—that writing slim and peculiar books, then moving to L.A. to churn out B movies and shoot animals for fun (and not wild beasts, like Hemingway, but small birds, mostly doves), is not enough to vindicate an inconsistent oeuvre. West’s “failure to get the best out of [his] best years,” said Edmund Wilson, who was his friend, “may certainly be laid partly to Hollywood, with its already appalling record of talent depraved and wasted.” Readers, in other words, should blame the neighborhood.

more from Nathan Heller at Slate here.

As one of the first American journalists to arrive in Berlin after the end of the Second World War, John Dos Passos was embarrassed by the devastation the American B29s had inflicted. At Stettiner Station he saw large crowds of bewildered people, their skin hanging on their bones ‘like candle drippings’. Berlin, he recalled, was not ‘just one more beaten-up city: there the point had been reached where the victims were degraded beneath the reach of human sympathy’. When Malcolm Muggeridge arrived in the same city, he was astonished by what he found. By then the Russians had fought their way into the streets, house by house. The friezes and columns had been torn away from the Brandenburg Gate, from which the most warlike nation in Europe had once dispatched its armies in triumph. The trees along Unter Den Linden had been cut down for firewood or charcoal. The subway had been flooded on the order of Hitler himself, leaving people floating in black icy waters. The city presented a barren landscape permeated by the sour smell of rotting corpses and the occasional glimpse of the 50,000 or so orphans who’d been made deranged by both the bombing and the ferocity of the final ground attack. Did all this, Muggeridge asked, represent the triumph of good over evil? The world both writers saw was born from some of the moral compromises the Western allies had to make to win the war. That Hitler had to be defeated and Nazism crushed was the one moral certainty that sustained them. Churchill, Michael Burleigh reminds us in this magisterial work, gave a talk at the annual dinner of the Chamber of Commerce in Leeds in 1937 in which he told his audience that he had resolved never to visit the ‘Arctic or Antarctic regions in geography or politics’. ‘Give me the temperate zone. Give me London, or Paris, or New York. Let us keep to our faith and let us go somewhere and stay there where your breath is not frozen on your lips by the secret police.’ Within three years he had to reverse this view, expressing a pragmatic willingness to sup with the devil in order to defeat Nazism – a figure of speech that reflects his abhorrence for the Soviet system. (The grim reality was that if the USSR had not been Stalinist, it might never have survived the war at all.)

more from Christopher Coker at Literary Review here.