Tourists might stumble into a Scruton café in quite different parts of Budapest: one is on the second floor of a shopping centre called Mammut, surrounded by cheap clothing and perfume chains; another next to Red Ruin, a Communist nostalgia theme bar, which in turn is a few doors from the legendary Centrál coffee house. I remember seeing there, in 2004, a lone, lean, young opposition leader called Viktor Orbán working intently on papers at a small table.
Nine years ago, in the first years of Donald Trump's first presidency, I wrote about Harold Pinter's ranting poem ‘American Football’, and the way it anticipated the language of the president.
The Way of St Augustine runs from Ramsgate to Canterbury, a walk of just under twenty miles across open country. You begin by the sea. After skirting the coast to Cliffsend, under canopies of gorse, you cut inland, following the railway line past farmland to the town of Minster. From there to the village of Stodmarsh – one of the places to break the journey if you’re doing it over two days – you zig-zag over marshes like grassy canals. The mile from Stodmarsh to Fordwich, England’s smallest town, runs through a small patch of wet woodland – increasingly rare in these islands – with clearings that appear suddenly like fairy glens.
It should be clear that there is absolutely nothing democratic about the negotiations between Trump’s agents and the Cuban government. If an agreement is reached, it will be a pure distillation of politics from above. Unlike previous US presidents, Trump has not even pretended to have a democratic justification for his foreign policy.
On 20 April 2018, bidders gathered at Christie’s showrooms in Rockefeller Plaza for the auction house’s annual ‘exceptional sale’. The cover of the catalogue showed the top half of an almost life-sized marble statue of Hercules holding a cornucopia, his beard neatly curling and his lion-skin cape pulled up over his head.
The attack on the small town of Nabi Chit in the eastern Bekaa Valley on 6 March shows the value placed on human lives by the regime in Israel and its backers in the United States. According to the Israeli government, the invasion was a rescue operation to retrieve the remains of an Israeli airman who disappeared forty years ago. Residents of Nabi Chit and the Lebanese army chief told the BBC that Israeli special forces entered the town ‘disguised in Lebanese military fatigues and used ambulances with signs of Hizbullah’s Islamic Health Organisation’. They headed to the corner of the graveyard, dug it up but found nothing there. The town fought back, causing the Israeli soldiers to withdraw. To cover their retreat, Israel carried out more than forty airstrikes in five hours, killing 41 people.
The inaugural Shield of the Americas Summit was held at one of Donald Trump’s golf resorts in Florida on 7 March. The US president told the dozen allied heads of state gathered at Trump National Doral Miami that he didn’t have time to learn ‘your damn language’. He scolded them for the reach of organised crime in their countries, as if US drug policies had nothing to do with it. Trump said he’d be happy to use missiles to target traffickers should his partners request it, and that Cuba was ‘at the end of the line’. Pete Hegseth announced that he only spoke ‘American’.