Author: Alexander Boot

…about anything else” was a slogan in the advertising campaign for Castlemaine XXXX beer. Like most successful campaigns, it capitalised on the underlying perception already in existence.

Since I’ve never been to Australia, I can’t say whether or not reality corresponds to the image. But, as Marshall McLuhan said, “perception is reality”. I’m not sure this maxim tallies with the moral and intellectual history of the West, but it certainly works in advertising.

Australians enjoy the reputation of beer-swilling, fun-loving, hard-swearing, Anzac-hat-wearing chaps one would like to be out on the town with but wouldn’t like to cross. A nation of Crocodile Dundees, as projected by popular media.

Actually, I’ve drunk a fair amount of beer with Australians, having played tennis matches against many, and, on this limited exposure, found them seldom veering too far from their reputation. Good tennis players too, and they never knowingly give a bad line call, which is more than I can say for some other people but won’t, out of respect for my French friends.

Then, over the past few days, I’ve read three things about Australians that didn’t exactly shatter my perception of them, but did dent it somewhat.

First, a man has just been sentenced in New South Wales under the state’s ‘one-punch’ law. Introduced in 2014 in response to alcohol-induced violence, the law says that those convicted of fatal one-punch assaults will face a minimum of eight years in prison.

I haven’t gone into the text in detail, but the wording sounds odd. It seems to exonerate those drunks who achieve the same lethal end with several punches, rather than just one. ‘Fatal beating’ would sound like a better rubric, but then I did say I haven’t studied the law deeply.

Also, a minimum sentence of eight years strikes me as too low for manslaughter, but perhaps the Aussies regard drunkenness as a mitigating circumstance. I’d treat it as an aggravating one, but then Australian legislative bodies never solicited my opinion.

Then I’ve discovered that beer consumption in Australia has halved since 1979, while the consumption of wine has increased pari passu. In other words, Aussies are abandoning beer for wine, which may explain the need for the one-punch law.

Back in the 1980s I witnessed a similar shift in Texas, which could rival Australia for beer consumption per capita. Texans didn’t quite appreciate that, though both wine and beer are weaker than Bourbon, wine is three times as strong as Lone Star.

Hence my colleagues, who would typically drink two or three beers at lunchtime, began to order a litre of wine – with detrimental consequences for their postprandial output. Also, accusations of Oedipal relations with their mothers were levelled at their fellow drinkers with no provocation whatsoever.

If that’s what’s happening Down Under, a note to Australians: a can of XXXX has as much volume as three glasses of wine, but the latter pack a bigger punch, and so conceivably could the drinker.

Having established a causal relationship between those two developments, I can’t for the life of me fit the third one into the same logical chain.

I’m referring to the new law that has legalised homosexual marriage and punched a hole in my stereotype of Australians. “It is a big Australian hug for all same-sex couples, saying we love and respect you, now go out there and get married,” declared Prime Minister Turnbull triumphantly.

I wouldn’t hug too many same-sex couples if I were him – they may get the wrong idea. Nor do love and respect automatically involve a licence to get married.

We may have similarly warm feelings about parents close to their children, siblings adoring one another or, for that matter, people mollycoddling their pets. But it doesn’t follow that Daddy should be allowed to marry his little girl, a brother to marry his sister or either of them to marry Fido.

I’m not saying that the love claimed by Mr Turnbull is objectionable, but it’s definitely of recent vintage. What happened in December, 2017, to give Australians the love and respect for homosexual couples that had been conspicuously understated for the preceding two centuries?

Could it be – and here I’m trying to squeeze the facts into a preconceived theory – that the recent shift from XXXX to Chardonnay has addled the Aussies’ brains too much? If so, there may be other undesirable consequences as well.

For example, a bunch of rowdy Aussies, celebrating yet another one of their Ashes victories over the Poms, drink too much wine, then espy a happy homosexual couple and give the one-punch law another chance to be invoked… A thought too harrowing to contemplate.

The truth is much less interesting I’m afraid, and there goes my logical chain. The contagion of our toxic modernity has reached Australia, infecting its population as it has already infected most of the West.

Before long, Australians too won’t give a XXXX for anything other than political correctness.

And vice versa, it has to be said.

Witness the petition signed by 13 Russian recipients of the Légion d’honneur in defence of Suleyman Kerimov, a Russian billionaire arrested in Nice.

If you want to be technical about it, Mr Kerimov is actually a Dagestani Lezgin. But, when a chap makes billions in Putin’s Russia, he has been blessed by the laying on of Russian hands, ascending thereby to the celestial spirituality only true Russianness can confer.

The Nice authorities took exception to Mr Kerimov’s practice of buying properties at falsified low prices, thereby evading tax. Some of those purchases involved fraudulent third parties, which isn’t very Nice either.

As a parallel and enabling activity, Mr Kerimov is alleged to have carried into France his dirty laundry, which is to say suitcases full of cash to be scrubbed clean through French financial institutions.

Now can we please skip this ‘alleged’ business? Yes, I know Kerimov hasn’t been found guilty yet, but anyone who understands Russians knows he’s as guilty as Cain. And if he isn’t, he’ll be acquitted in the subsequent trial.

What the French don’t understand is the cultural differences. In Russia, laws don’t extend to billionaires, which is to say Putin’s friends – an amity that’s a precondition for serious enrichment. Laws are for hoi polloi, not for the new aristocracy formed by the fusion of secret police and organised crime.

So how was Kerimov to know that, in France, proximity to Putin isn’t sufficient to place a chap into the ultra sphere above the law? If he chooses to rinse a few suitcases’ worth of cash and then use it to cheat Nice out of tax revenue, what’s wrong with that?

That’s the underlying message conveyed by the petition. One of its signatories, the billionaire Mikhail Prokhorov, had his own brush with the bloody-minded French a few years ago.

He and his jolly friends were arrested in Courchevel for running a prostitution ring. However, the inquiry showed that, though the travelling circus did come staffed with a few ladies of easy virtue, they were used strictly for home consumption and not as a commercial proposition.

Mr Prokhorov was duly released with humble apologies and subsequently even awarded the Légion d’honneur. His friends, however, wouldn’t be so easily mollified.

By way of revenge, they bought Courchevel’s only disco and shut it down, thereby depriving the resort of its cultural, social and pharmacological hub. One would have thought that the French would learn their lesson, but they’re proving obtuse.

Rather than explaining the cultural differences, the petition signatories, who also include Putin’s court musicians Gergiev and Bashmet, stress the humanitarian aspect of the affair.

They beg the French authorities to treat Kerimov “with humanity and humanism, not to jeopardise his life, and to allow him to return to the medical help essential to sustaining his life.” The text is as awful in Russian as it is in my translation, but then Messrs Gergiev and Bashmet prefer to express their spirituality musically, while Mr Prokhorov expresses it arithmetically.

But the emotional effect of their missive is heart-rending. Hold on, let me wipe the tears and catch my breath. Now, what’s the nature of the danger to Mr Kerimov’s life, which is exacerbated by French beastliness?

A few years ago he crashed his Ferrari speeding through La Promenade des Anglais in that same Nice. As a result, he and his companion, the sexy TV presenter Tina Kandelaki, suffered bad burns.

I don’t know how Miss Kandelaki handles the damage, nor how Mrs Kerimov felt about that vehicular mishap, but Mr Kerimov has to wear flesh-coloured gloves to conceal his scars. There may be other damage as well, for all I know.

So clearly those French people are beasts, locking up this man manacled to the wall of a damp cell with no access to medical help… Hold on another second. It turns out nothing quite so bad has befallen Mr Kerimov.

The French authorities simply took his passport away and told him to stay in Nice for the duration of the investigation. Not quite the Gulag, is it?

I can see how staying in Nice, especially out of season, may constitute inhuman treatment for some people, though perhaps not for Mr Kerimov, whose affection for the place hasn’t been diminished by its draconian traffic laws designed to punish Ferrari drivers.

One thing I reject out of hand is the implied suggestion that only by leaving for Moscow would Mr Kerimov be able to get the life-saving medical help he so badly needs.

One reason Russian criminalised oligarchs spend so much time in the West is precisely that qualified medical help is available here and not available in Russia. Russian medicine is like Russian laws, there only for the plebs.

It’s not the only reason: oligarchs’ children are educated in the West, their money is laundered and kept in the West, their yachts are moored in the West. The West, in other words, may be bereft of the Russians’ celestial spirituality, but it makes up for it in the quality of its earthly amenities.

Now I too petition the French authorities to take immediate action in response to this entreaty. What I have in mind is revoking the Légion d’honneur of all 13 signatories and telling them to shut up, mind their own business and refrain from submitting mendacious drivel to civilised countries.

“If the poor are to rise, the rich have to fall,” writes Phillip Collins in The Times.

This is yet another salvo fired in the skirmish raging on the ground of social mobility. La donna wants to be upwardly mobile, there are no two ways about it.

That the article is as inane as all of Mr Collins’s other output wouldn’t be worth mentioning if it didn’t represent the widespread morass sucking the issue in. But it does, so a few comments are in order.

First, equating social mobility with the economic kind means confusing two things related to each other only tangentially. Underneath this confusion lies (in both senses of the word) Marx’s definition of class as ‘relationship to the means of production’.

To divest this gibberish of its pseudoscientific fog of recondite vocabulary, the more money, the higher the class. Yet anyone who believes this must also believe that, say, Henry Ford occupied a higher rung on the social ladder than, say, Winston Churchill.

This is a glint thrown on social thought by the flashing strobe light of what I call ‘totalitarian economism’, viewing the whole complexity of life from the economic perspective. The resulting intellectual epilepsy endangers the moral and intellectual life of society.

Class is defined not by money but by culture, as anyone who has ever read Trump’s tweets will attest. And it’s culture, not just love, that money can’t buy.

So fine, let’s forgive Mr Collins this terminological imprecision – God knows he isn’t the only one. Let’s also forgive him such truisms as: “The children of parents who are not equipped to pass on too much knowledge or wisdom will have, by the age of three, heard perhaps a million fewer words than the children of professional parents.”

So a household full of books is more likely to produce cultured children than one full of crushed beer cans? Crikey. Who coulda thunk.

One could offer only one measure to bring that observation in line with the desideratum of the rich falling. Such bibliophile parents should be electronically tagged with a device monitoring the number and length of words they use in the presence of children. The device must have a feature sending an electric shock through Dad’s testicles every time he accuses junior of ‘contumely’, ‘indolence’ or ‘discourtesy’.

Mr Collins doesn’t go into such fine detail, but one assumes that’s the sort of thing he has in mind when suggesting that: “A society that really cared about being mobile would find a way to ensure its princes could slide down a snake too.”

But we’ve already established that at issue here is economic, rather than social or God forbid cultural, mobility. And in this area Mr Collins does offer a practical solution: “If Britain were to start creating more high-quality professional jobs, that would do wonders for mobility.”

Or not, as the case may be, would suggest anyone who remembers the demise of Barings, Britain’s oldest merchant bank, killed dead by an upwardly mobile lout Nick Leeson. The mobility curve of its subsequently dismissed employees must have swerved downwards quite sharply as a result.

The trouble with the Collins Model (or shall we call it Paradigm, as in ‘Brother, can you paradigm?’) is that it doesn’t add up arithmetically. For one ‘high-quality professional’ programming a conveyor-belt computer can put hundreds of manual workers out of a job.

What are they supposed to do? Retrain as Times columnists? By the looks of it, the intellectual leap between the two points isn’t unduly long, but there would be too many formalities to overcome and technicalities to surmount.

There are only so many fund managers and systems analysts that an economy can support. But even assuming that this number is limitless, producing enough people qualified to fill such positions would involve a paradigm exactly opposite to the one for which Mr Collins’s Marxist loins ache.

For greater numbers of people to move up the social ladder, there should be a ladder in the first place. Without it, society will never climb out of the putrid swamp of coerced egalitarianism – as has been shown in every place where egalitarianism has been tried in earnest.

When Britain was still Britain, the proper hoists for social mobility were extant. Prime among them was the grammar school, a state institution offering the bootstraps by which the more capable poor children could pull themselves up.

It’s true that children from wealthier families didn’t always have to demonstrate ability to gain access to good schools. That, however, is the way of the world – life is unfair, to repeat a cliché.

At least grammar schools opened paths to social, economic and cultural rise to a quarter of the population. The rest were indeed more likely to die within the same class they were born to, a situation that upsets Mr Collins no end.

The assumption seems to be that there’s something inherently demeaning and undignified about staying within the working classes. This is condescending bilge.

By way of experiment, look at the newsreels of football matches from the 1950s, when most spectators were working class, in the Marxist sense of the word. Now compare those crowds with today’s well-heeled fans, which they have to be to afford £50 tickets regularly.

The old crowd were well-dressed, well-behaved, well-spoken, full of dignity and good cheer. Today’s lot are snarling, swearing, violent louts, sporting tattoos, proletarian clothes and mugs contorted by rage.

Our problem isn’t too little social mobility, but too much. Mobility of any kind is only commendable when it signifies movement towards a worthy destination – not just any old movement.

But Mr Collins needn’t bother: we’re halfway there. The rich have already fallen – from the high perch where money, culture and political power were in the same hands. It’s as a direct result of that tumble that the poor haven’t risen.

Small minds concentrate on small issues. Conversely, preoccupation with small issues, fragments rather than the whole picture, is guaranteed to make smaller even a mind that otherwise has a potential for growth.

The situation becomes much worse when such small minds are animated by great passions, especially those springing from hate.

This is hard to condone but, in the case of our fascisoid populists, easy to understand. They see the cancerous cells multiplying in our society and justifiably fear the disease may be fatal.

Unable to diagnose it properly, which few people ever can, they react emotionally – by lashing out against the symptoms of the disease, while ignoring the underlying condition and not even pondering its aetiology.

The two symptoms that rile them most are the most visible ones: the EU destroying Britain’s constitution, and the insanely huge Muslim presence destroying most of everything else.

They have every right to feel beleaguered: the disease is metastasising rapidly and the symptoms are indeed excruciating. However, by the same token, people afflicted with brain cancer suffer from horrendous headaches. But that disease is treated systemically with chemotherapy, not symptomatically with aspirin.

Let’s look at the first symptom of malignancy: Britain first joining, and now only halfheartedly (if at all) trying to leave, the manifestly wicked EU. A good starting point would be to think which British PM of yore would have been prepared to sign the subversive piece of paper John Major signed in 1992.

Pitt? Canning? Gladstone? Disraeli? Or, closer to our own time, Churchill? The thought that any of them could have destroyed Britain’s entire political history with a flourish of a pen is preposterous.

So what has changed? Obviously, the whole political balance of arguably history’s most successful constitution, lovingly cultivated for many centuries, has been destroyed.

Here it’s useful to remember that politics is but one atom in the polyvalent molecule of a nation. Just like atoms in a chemical compound, a nation’s atoms exist in harmony with one another, attracted as they are to the common centre.

In any nation, this centre is metaphysical: metaphysics is the source from which everything else flows. Thus a similar metaphysical core will produce startling similarities between nations that otherwise seem to have little in common.

(Compare, for example, the aesthetics of Bolshevik Russia and Nazi Germany: their architecture, painting, livery, music are twins, even though the nations are very different.)

One doesn’t have to be a practising Christian (though it does help to understand the history of Christendom) to know that Christianity was the metaphysical core of Britain – actively for 1,000 years or so and then residually for a century or two.

That doesn’t mean that Britain ever was anything like a theocracy, nor even that the religious ague at the grassroots was particularly febrile. If it ever was, it hasn’t been for a couple of centuries at least.

But it does mean that the laws governing the movement of atoms within the national molecule were informed by Christian morality and thought. Therefore, they were informed by love, which within that ethos is the essence of God and also the medium of his communication with man.

Love of something dear can, and usually does, dialectically coexist with hatred of anything that threatens it. A consistent Christian won’t hate his enemy, but he will hate the menace the enemy represents – and resist it with all he can. But love is primary and hate is secondary, which is the same relationship as between good and evil.

The twentieth century removed Christianity, and therefore love, as the centre around which everything revolves. This happened not only in Britain, but throughout the world – which is why more people were killed in that century than in all the centuries of recorded history combined.

The atoms spun out of control, with each acquiring a life all its own – valences no longer existed, the links no longer held. Rather than proceeding under the protection of a philosophical and moral umbrella, people began to respond to life’s challenges in an arbitrary ad hoc manner, leaving themselves open to slings and arrows.

The resulting method of thought and deed could be rational or irrational – that didn’t matter because the results became unpredictable, or rather predictably bad.

The rational, or rather pseudo-rational, method consists in actuarial calculations of immediate fiscal benefits, with metaphysics not so much brushed aside as ignored. The likeliest result is a disaster even on the puny terms of such ratiocination.

Hence the EU isn’t to blame for the rape of Britain’s constitution – any more than a fox is to blame for slaughtering chickens. In the latter case, the blame lies with the farmer who didn’t secure the coop properly; in the former, with (as goes the title of the book to which I contributed) the nation that forgot God.

Hating the EU is an understandable and even commendable emotion – provided it springs from love for Britain’s political history and especially its metaphysical basis, not from jingoistic distaste for Johnny Foreigner.

The same goes for anti-Islamic animus, as represented by Trump’s favourite British political party and other fascisoid groups. That Islam – not just ‘Islamism’, ‘Islamic fundamentalism’ or ‘Muslim terrorism’ – is Christendom’s historical enemy is a matter of fact, not opinion.

That, contrary to what Mrs May likes to say, Islam is incompatible with the British ethos isn’t an opinion either, but simply a matter of empirical observation.

But Islam is what it is, what it has been for 1,400 years. The tragedy is that Britain is no longer what she used to be.

The same question as before: which British PM of yore would have allowed a massive influx of Muslim immigration to queer Britain’s demographic, social and cultural pitch so much as to render it unplayable? Yet all post-war governments have done so, culminating in Blair’s criminally cynical attempt to boost the Labour vote with a million potential (and thousands of actual) jihadists.

The only effective counterweight to Islamic expansion isn’t hatred of Islam, but love of Christendom, with everything it represents. Such love no longer exists to an extent that would make a difference – and hate has taken centre stage.

That unenviable animus exists across British society, intensifying in close proximity to large Muslim enclaves and immediately following yet another Muslim atrocity. Parties like Britain First are its political expression.

The rank and file there – and I’ve observed many at close quarters – are hazy on what it is they love but in no doubt whatsoever about what they hate. This is a hallmark of fascism, although I usually describe them as not fascist but fascisoid: en route but not there quite yet.

In purely practical terms, they damage the very causes they profess to hold dear. The congenitally moderate British character may feel sympathy for the very things that don’t deserve any – simply because of their opponents’ fanatical animadversions.

But what interests me here isn’t just the practical aspect of it all, but the intellectual blind alleys into which politics of hate steers its adherents.

I’ve addressed several conferences in which the danger of Muslim expansion was the main theme. It was difficult not to notice that anti-Islamism happily coexisted with anti-Semitism among many attendees. For example, during the latest gathering cursed by my presence, this comment came during the Q&A period: “Before we solve the Muslim problem, we must solve the Jewish problem.”

The gentleman didn’t specify what kind of solution he had in mind, but one suspects the final one would do nicely. This may be extreme, but anti-Israel and pro-Palestinian sentiments are practically universal in those circles.

One detects a dichotomy there. It’s reasonably clear what these chaps hate, but what is it they love?

Israel has much to criticise it for, as does any other state. But it’s indisputable, or should be, that Israel is the West’s salient in its 1,400-year confrontation with Islam.

Similarly obvious is that the same Middle Eastern forces that wish to destroy Israel are equally passionate about their desire to turn Britain into a caliphate. There’s no justification for taking the Palestinian side in that conflict, but there is an explanation: a stultifying worldview driven by hatred, not love. In this case, there are two conflicting hatreds, and the conflict seems unsolvable.

At least the Left, as represented by Corbyn et al, is consistent on this issue. They dislike Jews (and the West) and like Muslims (and the Third World) – ergo, they hate Israel and love the Hamas. There’s some inner logic there, disgusting though it is. There’s none among our fascisoid populists.

But hatred doesn’t think; it emotes. It also tropistically reaches out for others possessed by the same energumen.

If these chaps proceeded from love of things British, they’d love Britain’s political tradition of justice, individual liberties, equity, and power carefully balanced among pluralistic and hereditary institutions. And they’d reject – possibly despise – any foreign tyranny that’s an antithesis to all those lovely things.

Yet this lot are united in their practically universal admiration of Putin’s junta that rules by rigged elections and totalitarian propaganda, murders or imprisons political opponents and dissenting journalists, suppresses free press, ignores the law, indulges in criminal economic activities across the globe, commits aggression against its neighbours, confronts the West in every conflict, arms (and not just with Kalashnikovs either) the West’s deadly enemies, co-opts the church hierarchy into the secret police.

What’s the attraction? Our fascisoid types clearly see birds of a feather there: those who like them are driven by xenophobic hatred. The flock is flying high.

The growing presence of millions of Muslims in Britain represents a deadly existential threat, and not only or mainly because of their propensity to blow up public transport and drive vehicles through crowds of pedestrians.

The cause of resistance is therefore vital. However, while sympathising as I do with the cause, I resent this lot’s championship of it. As strident of emotion as they’re feeble of mind, they just may succeed in making PC subversion look respectable by comparison.

Both commiserations and congratulations are in order for the latest developments in Russia’s rocket technology.

The former offering is appropriate because the launch of the Soyuz 2.1b weather satellite, a mother ship carrying 19 smaller satellites, failed three days ago. The mother ship managed to reach its intermediate orbit, but then the smaller satellites went awry.

The commiserations are liberally laced with sighs of relief: accepting as a given the Russians’ keen interest in climatic vagaries, one may still suspect that this was a test of a diabolical machine capable of carrying MIRVed nuclear missiles.

Had the Soyuz (incidentally, all spacecraft so designated are descendants of von Braun’s V-2 rocket still remembered fondly by older Londoners) been carrying its ultimate payload, a similar failure might have had catastrophic consequences. Even without nuclear warheads on board, had the 19 satellites fallen on inhabited areas, the consequences would have been less catastrophic but still unpleasant.

Let’s comment parenthetically that the entire Russian space programme, for all its incidental innocent uses,* is an offshoot of a military build-up. This has been the case ever since the 1950s, when Khrushchev ordered Sergei Korolev, then anonymously known in the Soviet press as the Chief Designer, to come up with a missile capable of delivering a nuclear bomb to America.

Using his own resources, and also the work of a whole team of kidnapped Nazi rocket scientists, Korolev delivered. Having spent several years in a Soviet labour camp, he was acutely aware that failure wasn’t an option.

Interestingly, his wasn’t the only team working on the project. While castigating capitalist competition publicly, Khrushchev recognised its advantages in areas that mattered.

That’s why he created two parallel setups working on the problem: one led by Korolev, the other by Vladimir Chelomey, whose staff included Khrushchev’s son Sergei.

Anyway, Korolev won the race and, when reporting his achievement to Khrushchev, he mentioned in passing that the same child of the V-2 could deliver a satellite into orbit. Being quick on the political uptake, Khrushchev instantly recognised the propaganda potential of such a feat.

On 4 October, 1957, the satellite was launched, contributing to world languages the word ‘Sputnik’ and scaring the living bejeesus out of the Americans. Indirectly, the Sputnik was responsible for delivering the presidency to Kennedy who throughout his campaign cleverly exploited the nonexistent ‘missile gap’.

The subsequent space race between the Russians and the Americans has been about one side trying to get ahead of the other in the military stakes. The peaceful aspect of space exploration has been secondary, though more important to the Americans than to the Russians.

Where Russian space launches haven’t had an immediate military objective, they’ve had a propaganda value. The Soyuz 2.1b pursued both, designed as it was to show the world that Putin’s Russia is still in the forefront of sci-fi technology. I for one am glad that she isn’t.

However, and this is where the congratulations come in, that failure was offset by the remarkable success of another missile project underwritten by Russia. Two days ago, the N. Korean ICBM Hwasong-15 was successfully launched from a mobile system.

I’ve already written about the staggering success of Kim’s missile programme, especially over the last couple of years, ever since the West began to cotton on to the true nature of Putin’s regime.

As the programme accelerated, the share of Russian components on N. Korean missiles was growing. If the Russian share in the Hwasong-12 was at least 60 per cent, it was 80 per cent for the Hwasong-14 and a minimum of 90 per cent for the Hwasong-15 – along with 100 per cent of the knowhow.

The missile’s range is listed at 15,000 km, which puts us all into the target area. Western experts doubt that the Hwasong-15 will be able to cover such a distance carrying a full nuclear payload – a missile capable of that will take another year to develop, they say. That’s all right then. I feel better already.

The Hwasong-15 represents a success of the Russian missile industry and a factor in Putin’s foreign policy, heavily reliant as it is on blackmail. Kim is Putin’s proxy, his joker in the pack. By arming the N. Korean monster to the teeth, Putin sends a message to the West: do as I say – or else this madman will do the talking.

That much should be clear to anyone who’s less enamoured of Putin than our useful idiots are (most of them, it pains me to report, on the Right).

I don’t know if James Mattis, the US Secretary of Defence, belongs in that category. I wouldn’t be surprised – why should he be any different from most other Trump appointees? One way or the other, in commenting on the Hwasong-15 launch, he never referred to Russia at all.

That oversight was corrected by Mattis’s Polish counterpart Antoni Macierewicz, who, speaking with Slavic forthrightness, flatly stated that “This whole N. Korean missile-nuclear business is Putin’s project.”

Of course Mr Macierewicz’s credibility may in some eyes be undermined by his explicit belief in the authenticity of the notorious Protocols of the Elders of Zion, but one suspects he’s more qualified in his immediate area of expertise, and less affected by the traditional Slavic malaise.

I’m not trying to indulge in panic-mongering, but I’m worried – rather a lot. You’ll have to decide for yourself how worried you are, if at all.

* I was involved in one such innocent project, having worked at NASA on the Apollo-Soyuz project in 1974-1975.

I try very hard to like President Trump. But he makes it difficult.

Liking many of his policies is easier, even though some of them have no chance of clearing Congress. But even when Trump is politically on the side of the angels, personally he resembles their less appealing antipodes.

That’s no trivial matter. For the wisest of policies and the best of intentions can be undone by their champion’s crudeness, ignorance, effrontery, insensitivity and inability to perceive nuances of thought and feeling.

These are all traits Trump has in abundance and, when they come to the fore, he can damage the very causes he wishes to advance. Such as the cause of checking Islamic expansion in the West.

In addition to his personal failings, Trump shares a characteristic American ignorance of European affairs and indeed of the European civilisation shaping the affairs. If it were otherwise, he wouldn’t have retweeted the messages first posted by the fascisoid, Islamophobic group Britain First.

I hope you realise that my definition of ‘Islamophobic’ is different from the likes of the BBC’s, Merkel’s or Blair’s.

To them, an Islamophobe is anyone who a) minds the creeping Islamisation of Europe, b) has problems with Europe turning into a caliphate and c) realises that this is indeed a real problem and not a figment of somebody’s febrile imagination.

By that standard, an Islamophobe is anyone possessing common sense and a modicum of affection for our civilisation – and no affection at all for the likes of the BBC, Merkel and Blair.

My definition of Islamophobia is simple: it’s hating Islam more than necessary – and using this hatred as the presumed axis around which the whole complexity of life revolves. Add to this a certain amount of radicalism, and fascism beckons.

Alas, when nice, tweedy conservatism refuses to acknowledge the gravity of the situation and respond appropriately, anorak-clad fascism emerges as seemingly the only available alternative to disaster.

Recent history provides ample examples of that. Thus the danger of communism was as imminent in the Weimar Republic as the danger of Islam is in today’s Britain (or for that matter Europe). Yet, when the German answers to tweedy gentlemen cocked a snook at the communists while sipping their clarets, the Nazis took to the streets.

They picked up the banner of anti-communism and… well, you know what happened next. By the time the tweedy gentlemen realised what was going on, it was too late. The anoraks or rather, as it happened, the brown shirts were running the show.

Britain First is a fascist group trying to ride to legitimacy the horse of resisting Islamisation. There isn’t much wrong with the horse; the problem is that it’s Britain First (and similar groups) riding it.

By picking up their messages and images, Trump has done untold damage to the important cause. He’s a savage who smashes a Stradivarius trying to extract beautiful sounds from it.

Criticism of his monumentally vulgar stupidity has focused on irrelevant incidentals, such as that the abusive Dutch Muslim shown in one picture was actually not a migrant but a native of Holland, or that the pictures of Islamic violence had been taken not in Europe but in the Middle East.

The distinction between native-born and immigrant Muslims is these days so slight as to make no difference. For example, the Muslim chaps who blew up London buses in 2005 were British born and bred.

And surely perfectly genuine photographs of terrorist acts committed by Muslims in London, Paris or Boston would be easy to find. The problem with Trump’s tweets wasn’t their dubious authenticity but their indubitable provenance in the fascist ranks.

The best way for Mrs May to respond to those inane tweets would have been to ignore them publicly, while privately advising Donald to do what I suggest in the title above. Instead she foolishly responded, using the word ‘Islamophobia’ not in my definition but in the BBC’s. Predictably she got back a retort:

“Don’t focus on me, focus on the destructive Radical Islamic Terrorism that is taking place within the United Kingdom”.

I’m always amazed to see how little imprint Trump’s expensive education has left on his culture and personality. Of the three words he capitalised in the middle of his sentence, only ‘Islamic’ calls for such distinction. Don’t they teach English syntax at Wharton?

Well, The Cause of Destructive Islamic Terrorism Has Got A Boost From Trump’s Opposition To It. I for one would be hard-pressed to choose between living in a Britain run by the mullahs or in one run by Britain First. No form of fascism appeals to me.

By chance, I ran across an impassioned defence of Trump by a Britain First moron, who, to provide unwitting proof for the validity of this designation, posted this on Facebook: “Edward VIII and Lady Wallis would be staunch supporters of Britain First if they were alive today. Recent polls show that 47% of Britons want to ban ALL Islamic migration.”

Edward VIII and Lady Wallis (wrong title, by the way, but hey, it’s morons we’re dealing with) were also ‘staunch supporters’ of Hitler. I wouldn’t want to be in their company – even though my view of Islamic migration is close to the 47 per cent.

Life is full of mysteries, and one of them is the Church of Sweden’s odd insistence on continuing to identify itself as Christian.

(In a more combative mood, I’d be capable of making a similar remark about most Protestant confessions, but I’m feeling uncharacteristically mellow this morning.)

One simply can’t associate with any Christian denomination a peculiar cult that’s led by a woman and ‘consecrates’ openly lesbian bishops, who then suggest that crosses be removed from churches and Muslim prayer space be allocated.

How about space for the Black Mass and sacrifice of virgins? Inclusivity has to be consistent, comes a scream from the depths of my soul.

The scream has been heard and partly acted upon. The progressively lesbian high command of the Church of Sweden has just instructed its clergy to make liturgical language ‘more inclusive’ by referring to God in a ‘gender-neutral’ fashion, eschewing such perniciously exclusive terms as ‘He’ and ‘Lord’.

God in Sweden is thus rapidly ascending to the progressive heights already reached by public lavatories, where any distinction between the sexes has been (or is about to be) outlawed.

The new guidelines helpfully offer an inoffensive prayer able to satisfy the most up-to-date of cravings: “God, Holy Trinity, Father and Mother, Son – Sister and Brother, and Spirit – Lifeguard and Inspirator, lead us to your depths of wealth, wisdom and knowledge”.

Ingenuous stuff, that, and it’s good to know that God has retrained for an alternative career as a lifeguard in a municipal swimming pool. But I’d like to have the arithmetical aspect clarified.

If my understanding of theology (and etymology, come to that) is correct, the word Trinity, Holy or otherwise, implies three. No more, no less – exactly three. If it’s more or less, it’s no longer a trinity, or am I missing something?

Mentioning every possible kinship in this context offends my sense of mathematical probity, among other things. But various spokesmen, or rather spokespersons, for the Church of Sweden delve deeper than the simple ability to add up:

“Referring to God as ‘Lord’ consolidates [gender] hierarchies and the subordination of women in a white, Western feminist context,” states one of them.

Again, I’m confused, which goes to show how far out of tune I am with modern Christianity, or modern anything for that matter. If the ‘Western context’ is already ‘feminist’, how and to whom can women be subordinated? If they do suffer this indignity, the context isn’t feminist, is it now? Sorry to be such a pedant, but that’s better than being some other cognates of the same word.

Another modern answer to Martin Luther explained that: “Liberation theologists, along with feminist and postcolonial theologians, have been crucial in identifying how legitimising hierarchies leads to violence and subordination.”

Much as we’re thankful for their invaluable contribution to theology, we ought not to forget the more indisputable role liberation theologists played in spilling oceans of blood in Latin America, Africa and Asia.

But then the son/daughter/other of God the Mother did say, “And fear not them which kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul…” No doubt the souls of the campesinos hacked to death with machetes in the spirit of liberation theology remained unscathed.

That’s what I cherish about modernity: it infinitely expands the boundaries of the possible. Public pronouncements that relatively recently would have caused a stampede to the exit, with some escapees dialling the nearest mental hospital, today can be made with impunity.

The kind of people who a few years ago wouldn’t have been regarded as fit to sweep church floors today make sweeping pronouncements in their capacity as bishops. Bishoprics in so-called Christian churches go to people who understand nothing about Christianity and seek to destroy everything.

In a more fundamental format, I think I’d be able to argue persuasively that what we’re reaping now is the toxic harvest sown by the Reformation, with its congenital commitment to destructive modernisation and the inviolable right of every communicant to make of God whatever he/she/it/other will.

For the time being, I’d suggest that the inner dilemmas impaling the Church of Sweden on their horns could be profitably solved by converting all the churches into mosques and inviting even more Muslims into the country. If the rape statistics are accurate, Swedish women – including the bishops – may enjoy a brisker sex life and an even greater sense of common purpose.

P.S. While we are on such ecclesiastical subjects, apparently Meghan Markle is to be baptised and confirmed in the Anglican Church before marrying Prince Hal. I don’t quite get that, but this time it’s genuine consternation.

Miss Markle is described as a Protestant. If we accept that Protestantism is still some kind of Christianity, then she must have been baptised already. It’s par for the course that she ought to be confirmed in her new confession, but what happened to “one baptism for the remission of sins”?

Anyway, good luck to Miss Markle on her citizenship test. What’s the height of Tower Bridge, Meghan? No peeking.

Sorry, couldn’t resist that. Cheap shot, I know. One shouldn’t propagate malicious rumours of Harry’s paternity, nor indeed point out his uncanny facial resemblance to a certain Guards officer.

One can, however, exercise some restraint in expressing one’s otherwise overpowering elation at the news of the royal engagement.

It’s wonderful that this worthy young man and his pretty bride are passionately in love. The world is a better place whenever any man and any woman feel so deeply about each other.

There’s, however, a minor point. Meghan may be ‘any woman’, but Harry isn’t really ‘any man’. Prince Henry of Wales is fifth in the line of succession to the British throne.

That’s why the comment made by Meghan’s sister is so wide of the mark. “This isn’t about royalty,” she said. “It’s about love.” Royalty, not love, is precisely what this should be about, but one doesn’t expect an American to understand this.

For Meghan will be called upon to stop being just any woman and assume the responsibilities, along with the whole ethos, of a member of the royal family.

That’s no easy matter. I won’t bother you with a long rota of royal duties, but they all fall under one umbrella: submitting one’s own good to the good of the dynasty and therefore the realm.

The requisite skills can’t be picked up easily: they take serious training, ideally from a young age or, better still, birth. That’s why royals have traditionally married other royals, or at least members of high nobility: their spouses didn’t have to do an inordinate amount of training on the job.

Whenever our princes have ventured outside their own circle, the results have been rather mixed. For example, the experience of British royals marrying American divorcées of a certain age and uncertain past wasn’t an unqualified success. At least, unlike Wallis, Meghan is blessed with good looks, sunny personality and a smile that evokes nicer animals than snakes.

However, hacks singing hosannas to her don’t even realise how worried they make people who, like me, take our monarchy seriously. Thus, for example, the BBC:

“She is a campaigner with a variety of humanitarian interests and won’t want her marriage to limit her ability to speak out and support various causes – particularly those of gender equality.”

I’m afraid she’ll have to – of her own accord or under the express orders of older royals. I doubt they’ll want a member of their family to enlarge publicly on a raft of half-arsed progressivist causes, however strongly said member may feel about them privately.

Most things our royals say in public are pre-censored, which isn’t always a good thing. For example, I’d love to know how Her Majesty feels about being just another citizen of the EU, Liz Windsor.

But I certainly don’t want to know what Meghan thinks about ‘gender equality’ even in her present capacity, never mind as the Duchess of Sussex. And I especially fear that, by expressing herself with a distinctly American lack of inhibitions, she’ll do even more damage to the dynasty than Harry’s sainted mother did.

Richard Kay, who knew Diana well, put it in a nutshell: “Diana would have been thrilled – Meghan’s just the kind of woman she wanted to be,” he wrote in the spirit of jubilation.

Quite. That’s exactly the problem. For Diana was, and always wanted to be, an utterly modern, and therefore brainless, woman, who was both unable and unwilling to make the ultimate sacrifice of self-denial I mentioned earlier.

Rather than conforming to the traditional standards of British royalty, she wanted the royal family to go along with every modern perversion she espoused, solipsism being the principal one. When they wouldn’t, she consciously set out to do as much harm to the monarchy as she possibly could, using every weapon at her disposal, mostly of a sexual nature.

That deprived the dynasty of much of its dignity, dragging it into the mire inhabited by sleazy tabloids and their readers. And dignity is the most prized asset of the royals, now they’ve been regrettably deprived of any executive power.

Fair enough, Lady Diana Spencer wasn’t a commoner. But she was common, which is why she couldn’t understand the key constitutional role she was supposed to play in British polity.

This role precludes fixation on the present and its fads. The monarchy’s job is to provide the axis around which the entire history of the country revolves. It links the past with the present and the future, establishing the nation’s organic continuity.

This is a solemn and vital mission, which becomes much more difficult when royals begin to star in gossip columns. Photographs of Diana with her numerous lovers or of a topless Fergie having her toes sucked by athletic Americans jeopardised that mission no end.

Even Kate, who’s doing her best to learn what it means to be a royal, has added her own pinpricks. Eleanor of Aquitaine might have ridden bare-chested in front of the Crusaders’ hosts, but I for one would rather have been spared the sight of our future queen appearing topless in French tabloids.

According to Dominic Sandbrook, “we ought to remember that monarchy is nothing if not a spectacle.” This is a self-fulfilling prophecy, and a hare-brained one at that.

Implied there is a circuitous argument: if monarchy is but a show, a professional actress should do the job famously. However, one may harbour doubts precisely because monarchy, for all its pomp and circumstance, isn’t a spectacle. Mr Sandbrook should really take the trouble of pondering our constitution.

Sorry to be a spoilsport, but a massive outburst of public enthusiasm is always suspect, especially when its cause is far from being unambiguous. The term ‘Dianification’ isn’t particularly mellifluous, but it describes the phenomenon quite accurately.

Putin has instructed Russian manufacturers to be ready to mobilise and switch into a war mode at a moment’s notice. For all intents and purposes, this means the country is already at war, for mobilisation has since time immemorial been regarded as tantamount to a hostile act.

It’s not as if the Russian economy has been particularly pacific until now. While in absolute terms Russia’s military spend is below that of the US or China, her relative spend is impressive, considering that her economy is ten times smaller than in either of those countries.

New weapon systems are coming on stream at a rate far exceeding America’s and China’s. These include the new generation of state-of-the-art battle tanks, nuclear weapons, submarine missile launchers, infantry weapons – and electronic attack systems.

The latter have already been deployed in a systematic contamination of the global information field. FCB-run Russian trolls have interfered with elections throughout what’s left of the free world, sowing discord wherever they can, confusing Western decision makers who are sufficiently confused already.

This is accompanied by an unprecedented campaign of fake news, drowning real news in torrents of lying effluvia. The obvious aim is to paralyse the West’s will to resist any subsequent Russian aggression, while also testing systems designed to render military communications and command structures ineffective.

“Why should Russia do this?” asks the British hack Nick Robinson. “One answer is her leaders have long believed that they are under assault from the West.” This ‘explanation’ is nothing new, as I’ve discovered.

A couple of weeks ago I spoke, on an unrelated subject, at a quasi-conservative conference. The speaker after me was a British academic seen in those circles as a Russian expert.

I couldn’t decide whether he was a paid troll or an honestly misguided ‘useful idiot’. One way or the other, that amiable chap faithfully regurgitated and endorsed Putin’s propaganda on every point, including Russia’s amply justified fear of Western aggression.

The presentation received much approbation, rather than the opprobrium it so richly deserved. My objections were drowned in an outburst of febrile indignation. Obviously, telling the truth on this subject is tantamount to blasphemy in those patriotic circles.

It’s true that Putin’s totalitarian propaganda portrays Russia’s aggression against the Ukraine as engaging the United States on a proxy battleground. But then predators always look for excuses.

In 1939 Nazi Germany attacked Poland having first staged a bogus raid, supposedly by the Poles but in fact by SS special troops, on a German radio station. Russia attacked Finland in the same year having first shelled its own border outpost and blamed the attack on the Finns.

Nazi aggression against Poland and, a year earlier, Czechoslovakia was justified as a humanitarian concern for the plight of the oppressed German minorities. The Soviets preceded their rape of Hungary by a massive disinformation campaign aimed at showing that theirs was a last-ditch action to save the country from an American invasion.

Such is the fine tradition within which Putin’s propaganda operates, ably assisted by our own trolls, useful idiots and governments that have neither the brains to perceive Russia’s aggression nor the courage to resist it.

On what basis do the Russians believe they are “under assault from the West”, which belief my co-speaker thinks is legitimate? Does Putin seriously think Nato may launch a preemptive nuclear attack? Is it going to deploy massive tank armies on Russian borders, poised to roll across like a steel juggernaut?

Well, the three biggest European armies, French, German and British, have, respectively, 423, 408 and 407 tanks. By contrast, Russia officially boasts 15,500 tanks in active service – and there are also tens of thousands of older but still perfectly serviceable models mothballed until the right occasion.

Tanks are a quintessentially offensive weapon. So are airborne troops, of whom Russia has about 60,000, roughly four to five divisions. By contrast, the US army has only one fully trained airborne division, the 82^nd. (Some others are called airborne but don’t do any jump training.) So who’s showing aggressive intent?

As proof of Russia’s well-justified fears, the chairman of the aforementioned conference explained that the very fact that Nato is obligated to defend all its members, including the Baltics, constitutes a factor of danger.

Agreed. But the danger can only arise in case of Russia’s aggression against the Baltics. Portraying the situation as evidence of Western bellicosity is cloud cuckoo land.

True, the West is beginning to scrape together some will to resist Russia’s malevolent presence in the world. Token contingents of Nato troops, numbering in hundreds, rather than the more appropriate hundreds of thousands, have been deployed near Russia’s borders.

Does their presence give Putin sleepless nights? Does he toss and turn, worrying that his 3,371,027-strong army is too small to resist a couple of Western battalions? If so, step up the training, I’d suggest. And perhaps getting pissed on duty isn’t ideal.

Putin and his junta don’t actually believe they’re under assault. Their clamour to that effect is a cynical attempt to exploit traditional Russian paranoia lovingly cultivated for centuries.

The fantasy of being encircled by enemies seeking her destruction is as essential to Russia as the American Dream is to the US. To feed this self-legitimising myth, Russian propaganda has always castigated every attempt to check Russia’s predation as the actual aggression.

Ever since the early sixteenth century, when Russia announced herself to be the messianic saviour of the world, “third Rome” in the words of the monk Philoteus (“and there will not be a fourth”), the West has resisted being saved by Russia. Observing from afar the circles of hell into which the world saviours were turning their own country, Westerners cringed.

When the perceptive observer Marquis de Custine visited Russia in the 1830s, he gasped: “This country is always on a war footing; it knows no peacetime.” What was true in the reign of Nicholas I has been 100 times as true in the reign of Vladimir II (Lenin) and his successors.

It’s as true in the reign of Vladimir III (Putin). Half the population are undernourished, pensioners are starving, a third of the people dwell under the official poverty line of about £250 a month.

The only realistic food substitute is the froth sputtering off the mouths of Putin’s Goebbelses. And those poor Russians, zombified by centuries of subsisting on that poisonous fare nod their agreement.

I don’t know if Putin will go to war. But I’m absolutely certain that he’ll maintain the present war hysteria gripping Russia in a strangulation hold. Without it, neither he nor his gang will survive.

In any case, the West should marshal its resources and communicate to the Russians in no uncertain terms that their attack on the West will result in the end of not just their regime but their country.

Appeasement, abetted by Russia’s witting and unwitting agents, mostly on Europe’s right, won’t work any better than it did in 1938. Unless we prepare for war, there won’t be peace in our time.

This article is based on an excerpt from my book How the West Was Lost. I remembered it, having recently seen a few exhibitions (invariably interesting) and read the reviews of them (not so).

The Renaissance is widely believed to be the birth of modern art. But there’s death inherent in birth, and the Renaissance proves this. For it partly reflected and partly set in train a fatal shift from God to man as the centre of the universe, thereby placing a delayed-action bomb under the foundations of our culture.

Now that the bomb has gone off, we could do worse than ponder the Renaissance from that perspective – and I use this word advisedly, both in its general and specifically artistic meaning. For during the Renaissance perspective became a painter’s tool of the trade.

Perspective placed the artist at the vantage point of individual vision and created an illusion of endlessness. Yet perspective isn’t reality but make-believe. It’s not so much the ultimate, scientific arrangement of space as a statement of belief in the exclusive truth of a scientific arrangement. In other words, perspective fakes reality to make it agree with a set of scientific principles that were taking on an ever-greater importance.

Extended use of perspective reflected an increasing shift from theocentrism to anthropocentrism. At some point man began to overstep the line beyond which lay the solipsistic belief that he himself was at the centre of the visual – and therefore philosophical – universe.

Believing that the ‘invention’ of perspective represented progress as compared to mediaeval art is naïve. More accurate would be an understanding that acceptance of perspective reflected man’s growing anthropocentric arrogance.

For, by the time the Renaissance arrived, perspective was old hat. Dürer acknowledged as much by stating in the introduction to his book that a reader familiar with Euclidean geometry needed to read no further.

Quite apart from Euclid, we mustn’t think that Hellenic and mediaeval artists could have failed to notice that lines of vision converged as they travelled away from the eye. They were perfectly aware of this, and acted on that knowledge extensively – but not in high art.

Perspective was known in ancient Greece, but there it was used in applied arts only. For example, the stage sets for Aeschylus’s plays in the fifth century B.C. were executed in perspective. The Greeks accepted this: theatre to them was frivolous. The truth lay elsewhere, so why not use the self-evident falsehood of perspective in the backdrop?

Mediaeval painters also knew perspective, and yet chose not to use it. They saw perspective as a fake that was unworthy of their higher purpose. Instead, mediaeval, particularly Byzantine, paintings relied extensively on reverse perspective, with parallel lines drifting further apart as they moved away – or else converging as they moved towards the artist.

Thus, the further from the artist’s eye a figure was, the larger it got, especially if it was a divine personage. This corresponded to the perception of the figure of God as the most remote and yet by far the largest of all – large beyond any human understanding.

Mediaeval artists didn’t regard themselves as God-surrogates. Their paintings were an exercise in prostrate humility, not arrogant self-assertion. When that began to change, the use of perspective grew.

Characteristically, it was mostly mediocre painters who were the first to rely on perspective dogmatically. The great ones, while acknowledging the existence of perspective, often complemented this plane of vision with others, where the rules of conventional single-point perspective no longer applied.

Even if we look at the evolution of just one artist, some interesting observations can be made. For example, Giotto, widely seen as the first ‘modern’ painter, started life as an agnostic wag, a Whistler of the late Middle Age.

During that period, Giotto used perspective extensively, though not with the same unswerving devotion that characterised most Renaissance painters. As he grew older, however, Giotto became a deeper, more spiritual man. Amusing his friend Dante by bawdy epigrams was no longer enough; more and more he searched for the meaning of life.

In the process, Giotto’s use of perspective began to decline; his vision was no longer that of a self-satisfied man. He was now attempting to understand how God might view man, rather than the other way around.

The Renaissance, and the period immediately after it, was the swan song of painting, and it was so because of the growing secularisation of art – hinted at by the universal use of perspective. As often happens with swan songs, the sound was so much more beautiful for being a dirge.

However, the greatest artists of the Renaissance and post-Renaissance periods, such as Leonardo and Rembrandt, continued to defy the soulless, scientific constraints of perspective. Their vision would not be squeezed into a proto-modern straightjacket.

Perhaps as a reaction to the Renaissance, the Spanish masters, particularly El Greco and Zurbaran, treated the device of perspective as they treated a colour in their palettes: one of many.

Walking through the Prado, one is transfixed by a Zurbaran painting depicting the artist himself as a minor saint struck by a vision of St Peter nailed to the cross upside down. In spite of being in the background, Peter is noticeably larger than the saint in the foreground.

To emphasise the hagiographic pecking order, the artist shows the minor saint in three-quarters from the back. And yet both his praying figure and the barely shown face convey the impression of passionate spirituality. At the same time, the crucified St Peter dominates the canvas not just by being its centrepiece but also by ‘violating’ every known law of perspective.

Rational arguments in favour of the scientific and therefore more ‘realistic’ nature of perspective as compared to the vision of the mediaeval masters are as misplaced as arguments in favour of atheism.

“Obviously,” sneers a modern chap convinced of his scientific rectitude, “when, say, Duccio, shows three walls of a palace at the same time, he demonstrates his ignorance of the laws of perspective. It’s impossible to see three walls at once.”

The answer may be that yes, it’s impossible. But likewise it’s impossible to see two walls at once, or even one. What’s possible to see at once is a tiny fragment of one facet, and arguably even that fragment is not seen ‘at once’.

What Duccio is thus showing isn’t a naturalistic depiction of a building, but the image of it that the artist sees in his mind’s eye. The painter seems to say that God would see the building this way, and it would be blasphemous for a mere mortal to argue.

Since Duccio is a greater artist than, say, Canaletto, his vision of a Siennese palazzo presenting three facets at once is ultimately more real than Canaletto’s picture-book depictions of Venetian palaces. Traditional Western vision was spiritual, not just optic.

Verticality in music is a rough parallel of perspective in painting. One dominant voice, presumably the composer’s, relegating all others into the background again may be a misrepresentation of the workings of the higher inner voice. The assumption is that, just as it’s self-evidently impossible for the human eye to see both covers of a closed book at the same time, so it’s impossible for the human ear to hear several voices at once.

The counter-argument could run along the same lines as above: of course it’s impossible. What is possible, however, is for an artist to weave multiple voices into the fabric of a seemingly horizontal aural canvas of spiritual infinity.

And as with painting, one can learn a lot by contemplating great artists who find themselves at the watershed of two different visions of the world, one inspired by faith from the start, the other initially driven by humanism.

What Giotto was in painting, Bach was in music. But although both were straddling the line of demarcation between the old and the new, Giotto looked mostly ahead, while Bach looked mostly backwards.

At the beginning of his career, Giotto was thus the first modern, which is to say humanist, artist. On the other hand, Bach was the last of the great composers who subjugated their personality to God’s and their art to God’s glory.

Giotto was the beginning; Bach, the end. And just as a tree bears fruit after its seasonal peak, so did our culture deliver ultimate greatness towards the end of its life.

Painting reached its peak in the seventeenth century, when the art of Spanish, Flemish and Dutch Baroque had taken over from the Italian Renaissance, having first learned from it. The painting of that period was largely a response to the pseudo-religiosity of the Renaissance.

For most of the Renaissance painters, religious subjects were merely an excuse to paint bodies, faces or landscapes. However, not any young woman breast-feeding a baby is the Virgin, and not any three men or two men and a bird are the Trinity.

The more human did divine figures appear to be, the nearer was God moving to man. Towards the end of the Renaissance, the distance had got so short as to be imperceptible, a relationship familiar to students of Hellenic antiquity but abhorrent to men of faith who were still not extinct.