Imagine, in the same month as the death of the muse of high camp, Susan Sontag, we have England in an uproar about Prince Harry and his silly armband.
Along with the Bible and Moby-Dick, Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America has got to be one of the world's least-read classics.
One of the old school of the British colonial service, a man with the irresistible name of Sir Penderel Moon, wrote a book about the end of empire and titled it Divide and Quit. At whose expense was this extremely dry joke? Look around the global scene today, and you will find the landscape pitted with the shards of that very policy.