Pour a couple drinks into a Republican above a certain age, turn the conversation to politics, and the odds are that sooner or later he will start to grumble about the bad rap Richard Nixon got.
Almost twenty years ago, an American friend of mine was drinking a lonely beer in a bar in Cairo. At the next table were a group of English-speaking travellers.
It’s a reminder of socialism’s lingering prestige that people still refer to the tyranny that ruled Germany as “fascism” and the tyranny that ruled Russia as “Stalinism.”
The most influential political thinker of the 21st century was born in the waning hours of the 19th, exactly 100 years ago today. Friedrich August von Hayek was the latest of late bloomers.
The British pound survived the Wars of the Roses, the beheading of a king, two world wars, and the loss of an empire, but nothing short of a miracle will save it from Tony Blair after the next British election.
For a visitor from across the Atlantic, the most immediately startling thing about British political and media life is this: everybody knows each other.