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I once staged a little experiment with the young designers on my staff. They all worked in the same room, with pop music providing background noise. Since I can’t stand that din physically, I told them to turn that abomination off whenever I entered the room.

“You just hate all vocal music,” they said. Not at all, I replied. The next day I brought in a CD of some Bach cantata and put the chorale on.

The youngsters showed acute discomfort. One nice girl simply couldn’t stand the pain. She plugged up her ears with her index fingers and walked out. Tastes differ, commented another nice girl.

Hence this little contemplation.

Homespun proverbs usually make sense, if only on a basic level. Some, however, such as the one alluded to in the title, are wide of the mark.

The implication is that beauty doesn’t exist objectively. Whatever someone – anyone – considers beautiful, is.

You find a Schubert lieder beautiful, he opts for pop, they prefer rap. So all these are different facets of beauty. It’s all a matter of opinion, isn’t it?

So it is – these days. But such totalitarian subjectivity defies not only taste but also logic. If beauty can mean anything at all, it’s so undefinable that for all intents and purposes it’s nonexistent.

Yet beauty does exist, and it allows for valid disagreement only within a narrow range. One man may discern more beauty in the finale of St Matthew Passion, another may argue in favour of the parallel part of St John. However, if either of them insists that a Beatles song is as beautiful as either Passion, albeit in a different way, he has no idea of beauty.

What is beauty? Pontius Pilate once asked a similar question (“What is truth?”), which did his posthumous reputation no good at all. For he tried to apply relativist criteria to an absolute, implying that absolutes don’t exist.

However, three centuries earlier the greatest minds of Hellenic civilisation had no problem answering either question. Or rather they considered the two questions one and the same.

Thus Plato identified Truth, Beauty and Goodness as the inseparable ontological properties of being (note the prefiguration of the Trinity). Beauty is thus inextricably – and invariably – linked with both high reason and morality.

A materialist may argue that, in that case at least, Plato thought in strictly metaphysical categories. Once you’ve accepted such terms, you may accept his argument. But here, in our physical world, nothing is absolute, everything is in flux.

Yet the materialist refutes himself. He is using thought, a metaphysical entity, to argue that metaphysics doesn’t exist. That makes it hard to take him – or any materialist argument – seriously.

Now, if beauty is an inalienable ontological property of being, we must be born with an aesthetic receiver, an innate sense of the beautiful. And not just we.

Let’s ask that same materialist why male birds are so brightly coloured. A peacock’s plumage, for example, dazzles with its profusion of lurid hues.

If the peacock is but a product of evolution, and if evolution is always ameliorative, improving the survivability of each species every step of the way, then how does a peacock’s tail make the species more resilient?

Easy, smirks the materialist with characteristic smugness. The male bird uses his bright vestments to attract females, thereby enabling him to pass on his genes and ensure the survival of the species.

Splendid, yet another mystery solved. However, it’s not, not really. First, that same gorgeous tail attracts not only panting females, but also predators. They can espy a male peacock from a mile away, and then pick him off at their leisure.

For that gorgeous tail makes a peacock cumbersome. He can barely fly, and when he tries, he can’t stay airborne for long. Hence he can only perform his evolutionary duty if a female gets to him before a predator, which isn’t the way to bet.

Thus his tail may spell suicide, not survival (the same argument goes for birdsong, which not only woos females but also betrays the male’s location). So shall we agree, at least, that the problem is less easy than it seems to our materialist?

If this question puts the materialist argument in a coffin, then the next one nails the lid shut. Whence does the female bird get the aesthetic sense to appreciate the beauty of the male’s plumage? It has to be innate, for a bird can’t refine its taste by going to concerts and galleries.

Furthermore, the bird’s taste coincides with ours. We too are dazzled by the beauty of a peacock’s tail, and we too find the sounds of a nightingale’s voice beautiful.

Suddenly, Plato’s idea gets wings. Beauty is indeed an ontological property of being, and not just of the human variety. This doesn’t prove that beauty is absolute and objective, but it certainly makes this view plausible.

We are all born with an aesthetic receiver but, like a wireless, it may be primitive or state-of-the-art. One receiver may filter out interferences and let us hear every note clearly; another one may let us hear only a hissing, crackling noise. But the music we are trying to listen to is the same in both cases.

Therefore, those equipped with only a dud receiver are in no position to judge beauty or speculate on its nature. It takes a fine-tuned apparatus of the highest quality to perceive beauty properly.

That’s where sanity ends and modernity starts. For modernity is defined, inter alia, by repudiation of hierarchies, emphatically including the hierarchy of taste, which is to say the ability to tell real beauty from fake surrogates.

Moreover, since modernity described on its banners the elevation of the common man, it’s also egalitarian aesthetically. Hence, affirmation of any kind of hierarchical ascendancy threatens to undermine the very foundations of modern society.

Even the hierarchy of wealth may be deemed offensive, which is the psychological basis of socialism. Yet rankling though such inequality may be, it’s palpable.

No one can argue that a chap who has a million is no richer than one with only a thousand to his name. The latter may resent and try to dispossess the former, but he won’t deny the obvious evidence before his eyes.

Appreciating the difference between wealth and poverty is easy, while appreciating real beauty requires attuning one’s receiver to the right wavelength. That takes an effort, and most people aren’t going to make one in the absence of an immediate pecuniary gain.

But that doesn’t mean they can’t perceive beauty. They can but, every time they are exposed to it, they feel that the walls of their complacency are being breached. The whole fortress of modernity is about to come tumbling down, leaving them defenceless and despondent.

That’s why they may react passionately and even violently to any suggestion that some tastes are inferior to others. They are eager not only to assert any grotesque parody of beauty, but also to destroy the real thing.

This sentiment resides at the grassroots of modernity, and this weed grows taller and mightier all the time.

The playwright Edvard Radzinsky regularly streams stories of Russian history, as real as they are surreal.

One made me laugh to tears the other day and, though I don’t expect you to do exactly the same, you are still likely to smile. Barring that, you’ll learn next to everything there’s to know about Russia. (Aristotle’s inductive method I mentioned yesterday will come in handy.)

One of Moscow’s central squares is adorned with the statue of Yury Dolgoruky, the Grand Prince of Kievan ‘Rus, who allegedly founded Moscow in 1147. The prince rides a horse, stopping it just in front of the Moscow Council building.

Until the octocentenary of Moscow in 1947, Dolgoruky had been known in the Soviet Union as an “exploiter of the peasantry and the tax collector of the feudal system”. But Stalin, who liked to trace his imperial lineage back to the origins of Russia, felt a statue would be a fitting tribute to the founder of Moscow.

“A sacred place never stays empty,” goes the Russian proverb, and the Dolgoruky statue was to occupy the spot formerly filled by two others.

The original equestrian statue was erected in 1912 to commemorate Gen. Skobelev, a hero of the 1877 Russo-Turkish War. Five years later, the presence of that satrap to the tsar could no longer be tolerated by the victorious Bolsheviks.

After the revolution, the country was reeling under the blows of two deadly pandemics (typhus and Spanish flu), an equally deadly famine, the deadlier Civil War, a devastated industry and a collapse of agriculture. Millions, uncountable and uncounted, died. More to the point, the survival of Soviet Russia was still by no means assured.

All that made Lenin a busy boy, but he knew how to prioritise. So he still found time to remove the eyesores of statues to tsars and their servants. One such removal he led personally, that of the statue of Grand Duke Sergey erected in the Kremlin on the spot where he had been blown to bits by a terrorist bomb.

The leader of world proletariat shepherded his whole government out and led the charge from the front, in the manner of Gen. Skobelev or perhaps a Texan cowboy. The hands-on leader tossed a lasso over the Grand Duke’s torso and drew all his commissars into a tug of war. The statue was promptly toppled, eventually sharing the fate of its protagonist.

Clearly, Skobelev too had to be knocked off his pedestal. So he was, and an obelisk to Liberty moved into the vacated place, facing the Moscow Council.

The obelisk was topped by a statue of a muscular woman holding the globe, which irreverent Muscovites promptly christened ‘watermelon’. They also joked that the Council was opposite, meaning opposed, to Liberty.

Such humour was tolerated until 1941, at which point the monument was blown up, the woman decapitated, and her severed head transferred to the Tretyakov Gallery.

In 1947, it was time for Dolgoruky to move in, and a competition was announced. By then Russia’s best sculptors had become masters of monumental art, what with the thousands of Lenin and Stalin statues with which they decorated the Russian landscape. A Dolgoruky statue was a doddle, and they all pitched in.

To everyone’s surprise, the competition was won by a Sergey Orlov, known, if at all, only for producing small figurines of bunny rabbits for children. Yet he emerged the winner, teaching history buffs yet another lesson of that period.

At that time the US Ambassador Averill Harriman was leaving Moscow and, by way of a farewell party, Foreign Minister Molotov took him to an exhibition of gifts for children. There Harriman espied one of Orlov’s bunny rabbits and took a shine to it.

Molotov immediately promised to send it to him as a present and contacted Orlov with an offer of 4,000 roubles, a princely sum. Little did Molotov realise that the sculptor was a Soviet man to his bone marrow.

Orlov flatly refused to let his work be sullied by that capitalist’s fingers, normally used to strangle workers. Molotov could keep his blood money, as far as Orlov was concerned.

The rebuffed minister complained to Stalin, as one did. But Stalin explained to him in unprintable words that Orlov was right and he, Molotov, was wrong. To make him better understand just how wrong, in a few months Stalin had Molotov’s wife arrested.

Meanwhile, the great leader was so impressed with Orlov’s patriotism that he awarded him the prized Dolgoruky project there and then — even though he hadn’t even entered the competition. And the sculptor didn’t let Stalin down. He produced a small-scale model that very year.

Stalin’s first impression was favourable, but then he noticed that the horse lacked a certain male fixture. It was a mare, and no symbol of Russian masculinity could be seen riding one. Stalin’s famous yellow eyes narrowed, and the sculptor instantly saw a vision of a Siberian labour camp flashing in his mind’s eye.

Scared out of his wits, Orlov went back to the studio and attached the desired organ overnight. To be on the safe side, he made it disproportionately large, leaving viewers in no doubt that Dolgoruky’s steed was a very male stallion.

Stalin was happy, and a team led by Orlov began to create the full-size statue. The progress was slow, for the miniature figurine didn’t easily translate into a monumental sculpture. So slow, in fact, that Stalin didn’t live to see it completed. Dolgoruky first began to charge the Moscow Council in 1954, a year after Stalin’s death.

Khrushchev took over, and it so happened that every day he was driven to his dacha past the prince and – critically – his improbably endowed horse. Alas, the statue was lit up in such a way that the oversized organ cast a huge shadow on the façade of the Council building, much to the Muscovites’ mirth.

When Khrushchev noticed that striking effect, he flew into a rage and ordered that the horse undergo a sex-change operation. It took workmen a whole night to turn the stallion back into a mare by sawing off that monstrous appendage.

Federico Fellini, where are you when we need you? The Italian had such a keen sense of the surreal that he could turn this story into yet another masterpiece, provisionally titled Che Cazzo?.

I wasn’t quite seven when the statue went up around the corner from where I lived. It pleased me aesthetically, although I was aware of neither its transsexual experience nor its predecessors in Sovetskaya, formerly Tverskaya, Square.

Mercifully, I managed to acquire some sense of reality eventually, by leaving Russia and Dolgoruky behind in 1973. The men roughly my age, those who rule Russia now, haven’t had such a chastening experience.

Keep that in mind when you hear them insist that Putin is a reincarnated Peter the Great, Russia’s natural border is Pas-de-Calais, and it would take them just two bombs to turn the US into a North American Strait.

Do consider the source.

Let’s agree on the terms first, suggested Descartes, and for once he had a point. ‘Mind’ in the title stands for the rational faculty; soul, for the irrational one.

The juxtaposition doesn’t mean to imply that the English are devoid of the latter or the Russians of the former. However, the balance of the two is so different that many dialogues between an Englishman and a Russian will soon sound like a game of Chinese whispers.

The two will blame each other. The Englishman will think the Russian is incapable of grasping rational arguments based on empirical evidence and sequential logic. The Russian will accuse his interlocutor of soulless, cold-blooded rationalism.

Both would be almost right, with neither completely so. The English can feel, the Russians can think, but the value they attach to these faculties differs dramatically.

Yesterday I argued that the civilisations produced by Christianity and Islam are so different largely because of their treatment of philosophy. Exactly the same observation applies to Russia and England (or the West in general).

The other day I visited the Rafael exhibition at the National Gallery, and one of the centrepieces was a faithful reproduction of his School of Athens fresco (the original is at the Vatican).

The fresco emphasises the contrast between Plato and Aristotle. Plato is depicted carrying his Timaeus in one hand and pointing at the ceiling with the other, whereas Aristotle holds his Ethics, while lowering his palm to the floor.

This reflected the popular image of the two thinkers, and it’s unclear whether Rafael’s knowledge of their work went beyond that. In fact, Timaeus deals with many earthly subjects, whereas Aristotle believed that life on earth was guided by heavens.

Where the two thinkers really differed was in their method. Plato tended to proceed deductively, from the general to the specific, while Aristotle’s stock in trade was induction, systematic extrapolation from empirical fact.

However, it’s true that Plato’s work mostly affected metaphysical philosophy, while Aristotle’s influence was mostly exerted through his rationality. Even though he made no great scientific discoveries of his own, Aristotle’s method, when added to Christian cosmology, lies at the foundation of not only Christian scholasticism, but also modern science.

If you’ll permit a time-saving generalisation, English thought owes more to Aristotle than to Plato, whereas with the Russians it’s the other way around. Like many generalisations, this one allows for numerous exceptions, which are, however, indeed exceptions.

If you read Nikolai Lossky’s History of Russian Philosophy, you’ll find many references to Plato and hardly any to Aristotle. When I lived in Russia, none of my friends read Aristotle, but Plato’s Republic adorned many coffee tables.

Even though few Russians of that circle actually read Plato, all of them pretended they had. That sometimes led to funny incidents.

In those days, many of my friends were musicians (a situation that still hasn’t changed, actually). One of them, let’s call him Valery, was an avid reader and an even more avid show-off. For that reason, he always had a volume of Plato prominently displayed in his flat, to remind his guests that Valery was an intellectual force to be reckoned with.

Once another musician dropped by and espied the coveted tome. “Have you read it?” asked Valery as a prelude to boasting that he himself had. “I have,” smirked the other chap dismissively. “It’s all crap. And anyway, Plato ripped everything off Montaigne.”

Such chronological mishaps aside, it’s telling that, while Plato’s idealism was highly productive in Russia, Aristotle’s rationality never quite reached it. In fact, many Russian intellectuals profess contempt for rationality, which they routinely confuse with rationalism.

There is an unhealthy element of Gnosticism there, and it’s discernible in the work of many Russian thinkers – and practically all significant ones. Russians are supposed to be privy to some secret spiritual knowledge that gives them ascendancy over a soulless, materialistic, rationalistic West.

Dostoyevsky expressed this dominant attitude in so many words. According to him, the Russians were “the sole ‘God-bearing’ people on earth who are destined to renew and save the world in the name of a new God and who have been vouchsafed the keys of life and of the new world… [Russian thought] is paving the way for the great spiritual regeneration of the whole world.”

Elsewhere he describes how savagely most Russian peasants beat their wives. Yet that little custom in no way reduced their spiritual superiority over the West:

“Every [German] house has its own vater, terribly virtuous and incredibly honest. He controls the whole family totally. They all work like oxen and save money like Yids… I don’t know what’s worse, Russian swinishness or the German way of saving through honest work.”

For what it’s worth, one could suggest that on balance industry and thrift are preferable to swinishness – but de gustibus and all that. By the way, Dostoyevsky’s virulent anti-Semitism wasn’t just his personal idiosyncrasy. It’s widespread among Russians, partly as an expression of the same Gnosticism. One can hear Russian anti-Semites say, “The Jews are much smarter than we are. But they don’t have our souls.”

That underlying contempt for reason, especially as manifested in quotidian life, explains much of Russian history. It also explains why the country boasting the world’s richest natural resources has never managed to create a decent life for most of its denizens.

Even in our age of high technology, some 40 million Russians (out of 140 million) have no indoor plumbing. As they trundle through snow at night to do their business in icy outdoor shacks, they doubtless contemplate the innate spiritual superiority of their country.

Such Gnostic idealism comes across in every Russian TV chat show, in every speech made by Putin and his acolytes. They all address Russian souls, not minds – and they certainly say things that Westerners find baffling.

The other day, for example, the namesake of the Russian Platonist philosopher, Vladimir Solovyov, suggested on his Kremlin-sponsored talk show that Russia’s natural border is Pas-de-Calais. To any Englishman or, more to the point, Frenchman this statement sounds like a symptom of a terminal mental disorder.

But Solovyov wasn’t speaking to Englishmen or Frenchmen, with their hopelessly rationalist empirical minds. He was bypassing reason to appeal directly to the innermost recesses of the Russian soul, where such lunacy makes perfect sense.

All this would be innocent enough if such irrationality didn’t have dire practical consequences. If you don’t believe me, talk to any Ukrainian you know.

The Lady in Heaven has run into trouble in earth. This independent British film tells the story of Fatima, Mohammed’s daughter, which should give you an idea about the nature of the problem.

Since I haven’t seen the film, I can’t comment on whether Fatima is portrayed sensitively enough not to excite Islamic fury. But that doesn’t matter.

Since Islam prohibits any depiction of sacred personages, no portrayal would be sensitive enough. Fury is therefore par for the course.

According to the reviews I’ve read, the film opens with the scene of a jihadist murder perpetrated by ISIS, then to segue into the seventh century. This sounds like a hint at a causative link between Islam and violence, which makes mere indignation grossly inadequate. Muslims are prepared to kill anyone who says they kill.

Add to this the blasphemy of showing Fatima, albeit with her face piously covered, and bombs, guns or machetes become an inevitable form of film criticism. The popular aphorism notwithstanding, these are much mightier than the pen or keyboard favoured by your usual reviewers.

That’s why Cineworld took the mass protests in Sheffield, Bolton and Birmingham seriously. They pulled the film after just four days “to ensure the safety” of staff and viewers.

That prudent measure gave rise to many a foray into comparative religious studies accompanied by indignant comments on the Muslims denying freedom of expression, which we deem essential and inalienable.

My sympathy is with the Muslims. For, had Islam allowed or, worse still, invited free discussion, it wouldn’t have survived a millennium and a half. And it certainly wouldn’t have survived in any Western environment, if competing freely with Christianity first and secularism second.

Islam has to rely on doctrinaire fiat enforceable by violence because it has little else to rely on. Theologically, this hodgepodge of Judaism, Christianity, Zoroastrianism and Allah only knows what else, is too weak to endure by persuasion.

Look at its take on Christianity, for example. By some accounts, Mohammed spent two years at Nestorian monasteries in Syria. His treatment of Jesus Christ, as merely a prophet or perhaps a divine man, but not God, is certainly Nestorian.

This reminds me of C.S. Lewis’s book Mere Christianity, a brilliant exercise in popular Christian apologetics. Lewis relies on obvious logic to argue that Jesus could have been three different things, but one thing he definitely couldn’t have been was just a prophet.

The three things Lewis identified were Liar, Lunatic or Lord. Since throughout the Synoptic Gospels, not to mention St John’s, Jesus says he is God, those are the only three things he could have been.

If he knew he wasn’t God but still claimed he was, he was a liar. If he wasn’t God but genuinely believed he was, he was a lunatic. The only other possibility is that Jesus was exactly what he said he was, one of the three hypostases of God.

Not realising this betokens intellectual weakness, which isn’t unique to Mohammed’s view of Christ. That’s why Islam relies on exercise more than on exegesis. Essential to it is unquestioning obedience to the Koranic law and practices, while free thought is downright perilous.

That tendency intensified throughout history. During the first centuries of Islam, it was still in touch with Christianity and Judaism, moving along parallel, if not necessarily converging, lines.

However, their great philosopher Al-Ghazzali (d. 1111) argued, somewhat self-refutingly, that philosophical speculation ought to be banned. Philosophers, he maintained, got some things right, some wrong, but hoi polloi wouldn’t be able to tell which is which.

“It is therefore necessary,” he wrote, “to shut the gate so as to keep the general public from reading the book of the misguided as far as possible.”

Another great Islamic thinker, Averroes (d. 1198), Maimonides’s friend and neighbour in Córdoba, tried to fight that injunction. Averroes (Ibn Rushd, to give him his Islamic name) was one of the main links between Aristotle and medieval thought.

However, all pagan implants, and therefore Averroes, were roundly rejected by Islam and never properly incorporated into mainstream Muslim thought. Ghazzali won in the end.

Averroes exerted a much greater influence on Western thought, specifically on Christian scholasticism or, even more specifically, Thomas Aquinas and his Paris University.

The popular aphorism says that Aquinas baptised Aristotle, but what he really did was re-read Aristotle in the light of John 1:1 – “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”

The Greek word used there, logos, means both word and reason. Hence Christian thought could blend the Word of God with Jesus Christ – and the Divine Reason of Greek philosophers, Plato first, Aristotle second.

The fundamental Christian doctrine of free will could then absorb Greek philosophy and thereby encourage free inquiry. This later found a political expression in such notions as freedom of conscience, self-expression and speech.

That’s why Christianity created the greatest civilisation in history, one that has remained fecund for many a century. On the other hand, by choosing Al-Ghazzali over Averroes, the previously spectacular Islamic civilisation went barren once history emerged out of the Middle Ages.

The religion of Islam, however, has endured better than Christianity, and for pretty much the same reasons. For freedom of inquiry presupposes freedom of doubt. Too many avenues become open, and most people can’t choose the right one – Al-Ghazzali had a point there.

Thus Christianity got to be first doubted, then mocked, then rejected as the principal cultural dynamic. The great store of Christian thought opened its doors to the shoplifters of the Enlightenment, who grabbed Christian freedoms, carried them to their own home and expunged all evidence of their legitimate provenance.

That allowed Christian values to survive the demise of Christianity for several centuries but, as many are beginning to notice with horror, not indefinitely. Thus freedom of speech perseveres, but only selectively, as freedom of woke speech.

While Christian holdouts may resent blasphemous films about Christ, there is precious little they can do about that within our post-Christian civilisation, all too ready to commit suicide by free speech.

Such – or any other – freedoms are alien to Islam. It’s neither theological nor philosophical, but legalistic. The word ‘Islam’ literally means ‘submission’ to the law, which can be enforced by any means necessary, including violence.

That’s why Muslims are ready to kill any Westerner who blasphemes against Mohammed and his sacred entourage. That’s also why pious, which is to say good, Muslims are completely incompatible with the West. As far as we are concerned, the only good Muslims are bad Muslims.

However, they still make attempts to use our own perversions as weapons to attack us with. Hence, in addition to raising purely Muslim objections to The Lady in Heaven, dealing with its portrayal of sacred personages, the protesters also beat us with our own clubs.

Apparently, Mohammed’s under-aged wife Aisha, along with his closest acolytes Abu Bakr and Omar, are portrayed as conniving chisellers. And not only that, but they are all played by black actors. Using the logic they learned at English schools, the protesters accused the film’s makers and distributors of racism.

If you show bad black people, you are thereby saying that all black people are bad. And that’s racism, a sin that to you, Mr Englishman, is much worse than even blasphemy.

Hence the film is hit with a double whammy. First, anyone showing it should be beheaded in accordance with the Islamic scriptures. Second, that evildoer can be charged with racism in accordance with the woke scriptures. (Not necessarily in that order.)

So who says Muslims can’t absorb Western values and incorporate them into their own? They can. But the only Western values that appeal to them are perverse. That makes Islam… I better not complete this sentence for fear of decapitation.

Remember Kipling? “If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs…”  

One would think that the job of our saintly NHS is to delay death for as long as possible. True enough, treating patients is still one of its tasks. But not the only one – and perhaps not even the most important one.

For, as the good book tells us, you can’t be a servant to two masters. Hence the NHS has to put its true master, the state, before patients. And when its master’s commands are in conflict with patients’ health, there can be only one winner.

It’s from such premises that the latest outrage committed by the NHS can be properly understood. You see, the state has willed that all its servants heroically join its war on culture, tradition and indeed sanity.

The NHS is no exception. Thus, when the other day I walked through the good offices of Chelsea & Westminster Hospital, I saw that the walls of its atrium were tastefully decorated with vast murals depicting happy patients.

Every patient in every mural was some hue of black, which doesn’t exactly reflect the demographics of either Chelsea or Westminster, two of the most exclusive areas of London. But the murals have nothing to do with demographics. They are bullets fired in the culture war.

That wall art, however, may annoy, but it’s unlikely to kill, although I’m sure that the sight made my diastolic blood pressure jump up 20 points. Yet the NHS web pages on ovarian, womb and cervical cancers are something else again.

They offer public information alerting women to the dangers and encouraging them to make early detection possible. That’s a noble, life-saving objective, but achieving it involves the same general principles that apply to crass commercialism.

One such principle is making sure that the information works as a sniper rifle, not a scattergun. It should be precisely targeted to the intended recipient, effectively saying, “Look! It’s you I’m talking to, and what I’m saying is important.”

Thus a web page warning women about their deadly diseases should instantly and unequivocally identify women as its target. But there, as that pre-progressive writer put it, is the rub.

For, according to the government diktat, the use of the word ‘woman’ is actively discouraged, if not yet banned outright. Hence the pages in question are deliberately vague about their target. Talking about cancers that afflict only women, they expurgate the word from the text.

Thus, they used to say that ovarian cancers are “the most common types of cancer in women”. Now they say: “Anyone with ovaries can get ovarian cancer.”

Womb cancer used to “affect the female reproductive system”. Now it’s “cancer that affects the womb”.

Cervical cancer used to “develop in a woman’s cervix”. Now it’s “found anywhere in the cervix”.

You’d think that, though such woke equivocation is annoying, it’s hardly misleading. But you’d think wrong.

For the state has more than one prong in its frontal attack on culture, tradition and sanity. Its main thrust is education, thoughtfully designed to render people unable to read and understand English properly.

Hence a recent review showed that 42 per cent of adults were unable to understand even the most basic medical terminology.

This means that almost half of all women visiting that web page might not know that ‘ovaries’ and ‘cervix’ have anything to do with them. Their attention wasn’t drawn to the word ‘woman’ that would have the effect of saying: “Hey, it’s you I’m talking to.”

Another prong of the government offensive is runaway immigration, ideally from underdeveloped parts of the world. This is designed to dilute the demographic strata likely to resist brainwashing indoctrination.

Hence 60 per cent of London’s population don’t list English as their first language. Many such women may still understand ‘woman’, but ‘cervix’, ‘ovaries’ and ‘womb’ may well take them out of their depth. They will then go to another website, ideally one with more pictures than words.

I don’t know how many lives would be saved if health rather than wokery were the focus of such public information. Possibly many. Definitely some.

But the god of culture war is a jealous god, and he is athirst. He’s ready to smite not only culture, tradition and sanity, but actual people.

This little story isn’t the aetiology of the disease, but merely a clinical picture of its symptoms. There are many such clinical pictures and many different symptoms.

But the ultimate victims aren’t only culture, tradition and sanity – and not just individual people. It’s our moribund civilisation, desperately trying to survive, but failing every step of the way, bleeding out pinprick by pinprick.

So repeat after me the slogan thrust down our throats during the Covid pandemic: “Thank you, NHS!”

A majority doesn’t need special provisions for safeguarding its rights. A minority does.

It relies on everyone’s help to make sure its rights aren’t denied or abused. That’s why I hope you’ll join Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer in making a resolute stand on the issue of WWP rights…

Hold on a second. Are you telling me you don’t even know what WWP stands for? That only goes to show how little respect you have for the founding tenets of British democracy.

You must be one of those complacent individuals who take their rights for granted and ignore Goethe’s immortal words: “Of freedom and of life he only is deserving who every day must conquer them anew.”

In other words, if you fail to uphold WWP rights, you risk losing your own. So start by learning what WWP is.

It’s Women With Penises, a minority whose rights are stamped in the dirt every time a WWP is denied entry into so-called safe spaces: women’s lavatories, changing rooms – and yes, showers at my tennis club. Luckily Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition is led by a man who is prepared to tackle this challenge, the gravest one the nation faces.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Sir Keir Starmer: “’For the vast majority of women this is all about biology and of course they don’t have a penis.

“We all know that and of course they need safe spaces and we’ll support that. But there is a small minority of individuals who are born in a gender they don’t now identify with.

“Some go through a process, others don’t, and that is traumatic for them and I respect and support them.

“[For] 99.99% of women it’s all biology, we must support their safe spaces, but let’s not disparage or fail to support the small group of people who struggle with their gender identity and I think we can resolve this if we all approach it in that spirit.”

Sir Keir’s commitment is so unequivocal that he is prepared to fight even for those rights that seem to be mutually exclusive. “Of course they need safe places,” he says, talking about WWOPs, Women Without Penises. At the same time, we mustn’t “fail to support the small group of people who struggle with their gender identity.” Perhaps we should let WWPs in and then kick them out immediately.

WWOPs don’t like the idea of WWPs entering their dressing rooms for two reasons. One is physical, the other metaphysical.

The metaphysical reason is outdated modesty: they don’t want WWPs to see their nudity, partial or total. But this only means they refuse to accept WWPs as fully fledged women. This suggests a bias, a preconceived notion that has no place in our progressive society. Hence this objection must be dismissed with the contempt it deserves.

The physical reason deserves more attention. WWOPs are afraid that a WWP may use the P part of her designation to rape them. And one has to admit with chagrin that isolated instance of such rapes have indeed been reported.

Yet by the same token a danger also exists that a lesbian WWOP may also rape a heterosexual WWOP in the very same dressing room from which troglodytes wish to ban WWPs. Moreover, since lesbians greatly outnumber WWPs, that risk is statistically much greater.

You may argue that at least lesbian rape lacks a penetrative aspect, but this would only deepen the hole of troglodyte views you’ve dug for yourself. This argument proves that you’ve never seen the inside of a progressive sex shop, whereas even a flying visit would teach you that a genuine P is no prerequisite for sexual penetration.

So what are we going to do? Slam the door of every women’s lavatory in the face of any woman who can’t prove her heterosexuality or absence of penis? And how do we propose she could prove that? (Nothing from you, I know what you’re going to say.)

Now we are beginning to understand Sir Keir’s conundrum. On the one hand, he wants to protect WWOPs from rape. That means keeping WWPs out. On the other hand, he wants to respect WWPs’ rights to go wherever they please. That means letting them in.

I can see only one solution: passing a law eliminating all differences between, or rather among, sexes. We are all one sex or gender (a semantic nuance that escapes me, this side of grammatical categories): human.

Any of us may enter any space we wish, safe or otherwise. Yes, that may increase the risk of rape. But who said that a fight for freedom should involve no risks and sacrifices? Our forebears had to die for us to have the rights we enjoy, and here we are, whinging about the remote possibility of a WWP raping a WWOP here and there?

Let’s hear it for Sir Keir Starmer, the last bastion of rights still standing. And aren’t you happy to know that we have no problems more pressing than WWP rights to occupy the attention of our politicians?

Skyrocketing inflation, cost of living and crime rate; the possibility of a nuclear war; the sorry state of public finances; education replaced with indoctrination – none of these exists in Britain. One only wonders how this blissful period will be viewed by our descendants centuries from now.

They’ll note that, in the first quarter of the 21^st century, Britain had many women with penises. And no politicians with balls.

P.S. The Mirth of a Nation: The dictionary of Cockney rhyming slang is about to receive a new entry, “Don’t be such a Jeremy”. Every few months a TV interviewer hilariously mispronounces the surname of Jeremy Hunt, MP. An easy mistake to make, in his case.

P.P.S. Is it just me, or is there something incongruous about a Socialist politician being called ‘Sir Keir’?  Wrong honorific, surely? ‘Comrade’ is much more appropriate.

I looked up ochlophobia (a fear of mob-like crowds) and was relieved to find out it’s supposed to be irrational. Excellent. So I’m not psychotic after all.

Yes, I do detest mob-like crowds, and at times I’m even afraid of them. But that fear is perfectly rational, rooted in observation, experience and contemplation.

As a child, I was weaned on the tragic story of my cousin who was trampled to death by a football mob a year or two after I was born. My mother often told me to be especially careful to keep my footing when in a crowd. If I fell down, the crowd could walk all over me, just as it did over my 14-year-old cousin.

Then I grew up and saw crowds in action. Some action was benign, such as rallies or marches for good causes. Some was nasty, such as rallies or marches for bad causes. It didn’t take me long to realise that I hated the first almost as much as the second.

For any crowd is a sort of synergistic organism, except that, rather than being greater than the sum of its parts, it has nothing to do with the individuals making it up. It transcends individuality and therefore humanity.

A mob resembles a pack of wild animals more than any assembly of human beings made in the image and likeness of God. So they are, each on his own. But gather them together in a large crowd, and even God won’t know what they’ll get up to.

A single man, even not a particularly strong or intelligent one, is more impervious to manipulation than a crowd, even if made up of square-jawed holders of advanced degrees. The same  mob can be rallied by a great idea today and an evil one tomorrow, displaying equal enthusiasm for both.

How many of those thousands listening agape to Jesus’s words screamed “Crucify him!” the very next day? How many loyal and enthusiastic subjects of Charles I, Louis XVI and Nicholas II cheered – nay demanded – their execution when evil men began to shriek evil slogans? How many good, stolid burghers, salt of the earth each one, left their Frauen and Kinder to scream themselves hoarse at Nuremberg rallies?

There have been many books written on crowd psychology, notably by Gustave Le Bon, Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung. I’ve read a few, but found nothing of what I hadn’t already either observed or figured out for myself. Those things that didn’t tally with my thoughts and experience I considered misguided – you decide whether this is comment on those books or my arrogance.

This is a preamble to a comment that I’m sure some people, especially conservatives, will find appalling. After all, many a pundit rejoiced at the sights of the explosive mass enthusiasm caused by Her Majesty’s Platinum Jubilee.

This was held as proof of intuitive monarchism residing at the grassroots of our green and pleasant land. Rather than being cynical materialists, the British people are always ready to salute the royal standard, kiss the Union Jack and shout their love for Queen and country (God has fallen out of that triad).

So they are. But the thought kept gnawing at the far recesses of my mind that, should the very same people be told that the monarchy is an offensive anachronism and they’d be much happier in a republic, they’d be just as enthusiastic – provided a charismatic enough character rallied them together in a herd-like mob.

This afternoon we walked the length of the lovely St James Park, from Horse Guards Parade to Buck House, alongside the Mall. The park, normally one of my favourite places in London, was today dominated by the aftermath of the celebratory pageantry.

There wasn’t much litter about – the cleaners must have been working overnight. Or perhaps there wasn’t enough room left for the litter, for the park was jam-packed with Portaloo cabins, hundreds of them, arranged in clusters of a dozen or so.

Verily I say unto you, the outpourings of affection for the Queen must have reached diluvian proportions. Penelope, her English mind drawn to the concrete rather than general, wondered what they did with all the stuff deposited in the cabins.

For once, I was stuck for a reply. Every possibility that crossed my mind was too grotesquely scatological to enunciate. I just winced, reminded yet again of the hairbreadth separating mob love from mob justice – or mob anything.

The more I love people, the more I hate crowds. Call it ochlophobia if you will (the Russophones among you will recognise the same Greek root in the word охломон, good-for-nothing). Call it anything you wish – but don’t call on me to join any crowd whatever.

For they shall be called Manny Macron, to complete this, possibly blasphemous, bowdlerisation of the Beatitudes.

With his mind’s eye, Manny sees a picture that escapes everyone else: himself as a world leader. This reminds me of Schopenhauer’s epigram on the difference between talent and genius: “Talent hits the target no one else can hit. Genius hits the target no one else can see.”

Manny, alas, is no genius. His problem is that no one else can see his target because it’s not there. That makes everyone else sane and him deluded.

Since the beginning of Russia’s bandit raid on the Ukraine, Manny has felt the urge to talk to Putin. Now, if it’s true that Vlad is seriously ill, those chinwag sessions must have relieved his suffering. A good laugh is known to have that effect.

According to Manny, he told Putin the attack on the Ukraine was a “fundamental error”. Quite. So was the Nazi genocide of Jews.

The difference between a fundamental error and mass murder shouldn’t be lost on anyone with a modicum of intelligence and moral sense. Once grasped, that difference should determine a proper response.

One can talk to a mistaken man, helping him correct his error. But one shouldn’t talk to a mass murderer in the act. One should stop him by every available means.

Putting this thought in the French context, Charles Martel didn’t try to talk to Abd al-Rahman al-Ghafidi in 732. Daladier did try to talk to Hitler in 1938. That simple comparison ought to have taught Manny a useful lesson. If it hasn’t, his teacher cum foster mother Brigitte has her work cut out for her.

Every pursuit of fake political goals comes enveloped in mendacious jargon. Thus the toxic gas of appeasement wafting through France and Germany is masked by cant, along the lines of the imperative to “save Putin’s face” and “avoid humiliating him”.

Manny keeps banging out that tune with the persistence of a maniac. To wit: “I am convinced that it is France’s role to be a mediating power. We must not humiliate Russia so that the day when the fighting stops we can build an exit ramp through diplomatic means.”

If he means that every war sooner or later ends in a peace treaty, then this is a truism not worth saying. But peace treaties differ: some are signed by a Pétain, some by an Eisenhower.

If he means that, once the shooting has stopped, business with Putin can go back to normal, then this is inanity blended with immorality.

If he means that France (also implicitly Germany and conceivably the US) can twist the Ukraine’s arm into trading territory for the dubious privilege of effectively becoming Russia’s dependency, then this plan is both criminal and unrealistic.

It’s impossible to humiliate Putin more than he has already humiliated himself and his country. His bloated face is beyond saving – it can only be bashed in.

The Ukrainians are doing just that and, when the heavy weaponry promised by the West finally arrives, they’ll have the proverbial tools to finish the job. That’s the only possible scenario for peace: driving the Russians back to the line of 23 February at least, to the pre-2014 borders ideally.

This plot can only be realised through the denouement of sweeping political changes in Russia, the ousting of Putin and repudiation of Putinism, followed by a real, not fake, peace treaty.

Any other “exit ramp” would be a springboard to hell. For, even if the West complies with Manny’s innermost wishes and stops arms supplies to the Ukraine, the war will never stop.

The Russians may occupy the country or a large part of it. But Ukrainians will continue to fight the way they fought against the Soviets throughout the 1950s: as guerrillas. Except that this time they’ll fight as a united nation, not as small units of partisans. And they will be much better armed.

During the Nazi occupation of France, less than one per cent of the population joined the resistance, but they still hurt the German war effort, especially towards the end. In the Ukraine, resistance will bring together the whole population.

Russian soldiers will be killed with sniper fire, Russian trains will be derailed, Russian fuel depots will be blown up, terrorist acts will strike Moscow and Petersburg. The Russians will respond the only way they know how: with genocidal atrocities.

The Ukraine will be drenched in gushing blood, and then the flood will spill over to Poland, Moldova, the Baltics – and tomorrow the world, to quote Putin’s apparent role model, Hitler.

Manny refuses to understand this because he suffers from a dual condition: delusions of grandeur and cowardice.

The former makes him believe that France can be cast in the role of peace-maker, rather than simply a loyal Nato member, doing all she can to stop the spread of Russian fascism. This is a woeful misapprehension, considering France’s present ranking in the world power stakes.

The latter makes him fear Putin’s retaliation with big bombs. Putin is doing his level best stoking up such fears among those who scare easily.

He once compared himself and Russia to a rat that has to lash out when cornered. (A note to Vlad: try to compare yourself to more flattering animals. May I suggest a simile involving not small rodents but large felines, such as tigers or lions?)

But Russia, courtesy of her rulers, has cultivated that feeling throughout history, going back at least to the 16th century. The paranoid idea of being encircled by enemies wishing to wipe her out has become part and parcel of the Russian psyche, and it will persist for as long as Russia harbours megalomaniac ideas, which probably means for ever.

Building on that emotional capital, Putin may next claim he feels humiliated and rat-cornered because the three Baltic republics are still independent. They used to be part of the Russian-Soviet empire, and now they play at sovereignty. Come to think of it, the same goes for Poland and Finland. Their independence is a slap in Vlad’s face, which must be saved come what may.

Or he’ll claim that his face can only be saved by rebuilding the Warsaw Pact as a Russia-dominated federation. What will Manny be saying then?

Probably the same things. He is incorrigible, and his diseases are incurable. I just hope he – and his fellow Putinversteher Scholz – doesn’t infect everyone else.

Over the past several days so many millions of words have been written about the Queen that I feel hard-pressed trying to add some of my own. Yet one can’t ignore the Platinum Jubilee for any number of reasons.

The most trivial one first. As someone who has never stayed in the same job for more than eight years, I admire Her Majesty’s staying power. Seventy years – and she wasn’t a child on her accession.

Not only has she stayed in the same job all this time but, largely to her magnificent efforts, the job too has stayed more or less the same. That’s how it should be: the Church, Parliament and especially the monarchy are more than just institutions. They are instruments of historical continuity, binding together our past, present and future.

Hence they are conservative institutions by definition, the kind that, rather than disavowing and repudiating the past, try to preserve and foster everything worthy about it. Alas, both Parliament and our established Church are remiss in this vital aspect of their mission.

Both seem to be hellbent on undermining, corrupting or even destroying every formative tradition of the nation. That leaves only Her Majesty as the sentinel of Britain’s soul, and one has to admire her for doing her best within a constitution that encourages her to do nothing, but do it well.

Nothing, that is, that can in any way affect the affairs of the realm. She is the only person in Britain who can’t even say publicly what she thinks about anything of importance.

Hence we know that Her Majesty likes horses and corgis, but what does she think about the economy? Education? Medical care? Her prime ministers? Nato? Transsexuality? Female bishops?

I can only guess. However, even though I don’t know what the Queen thinks, I know and admire what she does.

Perhaps admiration isn’t a strong enough word. Awe may be more appropriate, for I’m always awestruck by those who perform deeds I wouldn’t be able to manage in a month of Platinum Jubilee Sundays.

Priestly service at the altar of God is perhaps the only approximation of the Queen’s mission. Self-abnegation for the sake of something greater than oneself, offering one’s whole life as a conduit of transcendence, submitting one’s own self to a greater good – that’s what a priest’s job is. And the Queen’s.

Both derive their remit and inspiration from God, and by all accounts the Queen sees her work in precisely such terms. She is known to be a sincere Christian, which so few of her subject are – and considerably fewer than there were at the beginning of her reign.

As their numbers declined, the gap between the Queen and her realm grew. A Christian monarch dedicating every breathing moment to service and sacrifice is desperately at odds with our world. Her subjects are generous in giving Her Majesty their love, but stingy in emulating her and everything she personifies.

They are more likely to misunderstand or even mock everything the Queen stands for, while professing, often sincerely, love for her personally. This dichotomy comes across, unintentionally, in many of the effusive tributes paid to the Queen.

I’ll mention only three, all from an article in The Times, which used to be a conservative paper but now has become an enunciator and promulgator of every modern perversion. Judge for yourself:  

“The Queen has always been a champion of multiculturalism. In her Golden Jubilee address to parliament she delighted in Britain’s ‘richly multicultural and multifaith society’, citing it as ‘a major development since 1952’.”

The Queen’s addresses to Parliament or the nation have little to do with her championship of anything. She merely lip-synchs the words uttered by her cabinet, led at the time of her Golden Jubilee by that revolting Tony Blair.

The reshuffling of our demographic pack has definitely been a major development, but it has been championed not by the Queen but by the ideological zeitgeist rendering our air toxic. It’s not the influx of other races as such that’s sheer poison, but the reasons for which it has been perpetrated, and the perpetrators’ motives.

Unlike America, Britain was never in her past a “richly multicultural and multifaith society”. She has been turned into one by those who loathe everything the Queen embodies and doubtless loves: Britain’s historical tradition, religion, morality, aesthetics, social dynamics. Millions of alien implants are used as siege weapons, designed to bring down the walls that have for millennia protected the nation’s essence.

Moving right along, “And what of the arts?… Within two decades [of the Queen’s accession], Britain had become universally admired for its musicians, actors and artists, many of whom were operating in a world of drugs and sexual liberation a world away from the occupant of Buckingham Palace.”

Not from all its occupants, alas. But I’m sure Her Majesty wouldn’t wish to claim credit, say, for the domination of our musical scene by the tattooed, drug-addled creatures whose music isn’t an art but an extension of erotic pagan cults and the pharmaceutical industry.

Britain used to be “universally admired” for Byrd, Gibbons, Dowland, Tallis, Purcell, Elgar, Vaughan Williams, Britten. Again, I don’t know what Her Majesty’s musical tastes are, but somehow I doubt she’d prefer Sex Pistols to any of the composers mentioned. The article’s author clearly does, so he doesn’t realise his tribute to the Queen is actually libellous.

And then: “In 1953 fewer than 20 per cent of British 16-year-olds were in school. Today more than 85 per cent attend. University admissions have risen exponentially. In 1950 about 17,000 students received their first degree, 14,000 of them men. Today there are more than half a million new undergraduates, most of them women. Learning is no longer the preserve of elbow-patched academics but has become a key part of British culture. Documentaries such as The Ascent of Man, Civilisation, and all things David Attenborough have been viewed by millions.”

That makes Britain a much better-educated country in the author’s eyes. Now, vulgarity comes in many guises, but one of them has to do with assessing education quantitatively and not qualitatively.

Most of those 85 per cent of today’s 16-year-olds who attend school will leave it unable even to read, write and add up properly. Yet most of those 1953 20 per cent left school educated to a standard not only unachieved, but unimaginable by most of today’s university undergraduates, whose number has indeed “risen exponentially”, but whose quality has declined at the same rate.

And, though I adore educated women, having been married to several of them, I, unlike the articles’ author, see the runaway feminisation of our higher education as a symptom of a serious disease, not a sign of rude health.

In general, what to any sensible person constitutes an educational catastrophe is to the author a great triumph. Again, I’m sure Her Majesty would refuse credit, if that’s the right word, for the triumph of what the likes of Tony Blair see as education.

But then she isn’t really of this world as much as she is an envoy from another one, of which the Times hack and his ilk know little, and one they probably hate. So it’s with the mixed feelings of sadness and affection that I congratulate the Queen on her glorious Jubilee.

Many happy returns, Your Majesty. Long may you reign over us for, when you no longer do, God only knows the abyss into which your realm will fall.

A word of special gratitude to Amélie Mauresmo, who risked her life (well, career) by inadvertently letting the truth slip out.

I now have for her that special feeling I reserve for those who helpfully illustrate the central theme of my work: modernity as an advanced form of schizophrenia. This psychiatric disorder comes in many forms, but they all have one thing in common: divorce from reality.

Amélie’s reality is circumscribed by tennis. A top player in the past, she is now the director of the French Open. In that capacity, Amélie is responsible for scheduling matches, and, as far as our woke schizophrenics are concerned, she shirked that responsibility.

Only one women’s match featured in the night sessions, when both live attendance and TV viewing are at their peak. Since Amélie’s remit includes, among other challenges, maximising the commercial potential of the tournament, she packed the night sessions with men’s matches.

When asked point-blank why, she gave the answer blindingly obvious to anyone who has ever struck a tennis ball in anger: “I don’t feel bad or unfair saying that – you have more attraction… for the men’s matches”.

Amélie, it has to be said, is in an ideal position to judge the comparative qualities of the two sexes because… Because she once coached Andy Murray, and what did you think I meant?

All hell broke loose, and not because her detractors had a substantive argument against Amélie’s statement. She was attacked for the same reason Nabokov’s Cincinnatus C. was sentenced to death: in a world where everyone was transparent, he alone was opaque.

Amélie refused to succumb to the pandemic of schizophrenia, and there’s no excuse for such obduracy. When a mania attacks, sanity must retreat.

The other day I was at my TV set, watching a men’s match on one of the outside courts, to be followed by a women’s match. Those who have general-admission tickets for Roland Garros are free to go to any court, except the two central ones that require a different ticket.

Hence the size of the crowd is a reliable measure of how attractive the match is. In this case, the moment the men struck the last ball, the stands emptied out – much to the commentators’ chagrin. Don’t those ignoramuses appreciate great tennis when they see it? They do. That’s why they left.

Those commentators, most of whom are former professional players, know what’s what better than anyone. They know that any decent male college player in the US or a county player in Britain would wipe the court with every one of the top women.

As to the male pros, they’d have to double-fault four times in a row for any woman to get even a game from them. And that’s not just because the men are bigger and stronger.

Some women players top someone like Diego Schwartzman, Number 16 in men’s rankings, by a head, and my money would be on them in a fist fight with the diminutive Argentine. And yet none of those Amazons would get a game from him.

The top women can hit hard or consistently, but, unlike men, they can’t hit hard and consistently. In her quarterfinal match, the world Number 1, Iga Świątek, couldn’t connect with two backhands in a row – her male counterpart Djokovic only ever misses one under extreme duress.

Nor does the women’s game have the variety that makes the men’s game so easy on the eye. Tennis audiences, unlike those of most other sports, are largely made up of people who play the game themselves. They know it well enough to appreciate not just brute power, but also creativity and touch.

One of the men’s quarters, played between Alcaraz and Zverev, would have pleased even the sternest critic. Not only did it feature a barrage of 130mph serves and huge hitting from the baseline, but the two players also treated the gasping audience to delicate drop shots, unexpected lobs, precious few unforced errors – and the kind of defence that would have put those Thermopylae Spartans to shame.

Show me a chap who’d rather watch two women play, and I’ll show you someone who prefers the sight of sweaty, scantily clothed female flesh to tennis played to the highest standard. Amélie, while not immune to female attractions herself, correctly identified their game as not being attractive enough for prime time TV.

When attacked by all and sundry, Amélie had to tender profuse apologies for her sanity. She doesn’t suffer from schizophrenia, but she can simulate the condition with the best of them.

“ I think the people who know me,” she grovelled, “who’ve known me on and off the court, throughout my career, throughout everything that I’ve done, know that I’m a big fighter for equal rights and women’s tennis, women in general.”

Allow me to translate from the schizophrenic to English. In this context, as in most others, the term “equal rights” means entitlement out of proportion to achievement (equal prize money for women is a prime example). Glad to have been of service.

P.S. Speaking of schizophrenia, which Russian dissident, aka traitor, said this? “Constantly blaming the West for all our troubles is wrong, wrong in essence. All our troubles are of our own making. Everything is caused by our own fecklessness and weakness. Wherever you look here, it’s Chechnya all around, figuratively speaking. Look at our economy, and it’s nothing but gloom and doom. Or look at our relations with countries on our borders. Nothing but gaping holes and problems everywhere…” Answer: V.V. Putin, 1999. Don’t tempora bloody well mutantur?