Inigo Thomas

Crashes of commercial airliners are rare. That they should happen so infrequently, as Clinton Oster and colleagues wrote in Why Airplanes Crash (1992), 'is one of the remarkable achievements of the 20th century'. Despite this, it's axiomatic of plane crashes, when they do occur, that they should be talked about as if they happen all the time. What happened last week to the Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777 that was on its way to Beijing? Who knows. On the Today programme this morning Justin Webb interviewed a man who knew something about flying. Webb talked about the importance of not speculating, then asked the guest what his hunch was.

'Bland calm' is the phrase Lesley Blanch used to describe one of Russia's most adept generals and one of the country's all-time most powerful people, Count Mikhail Semyonovich Vorontsov. He fought Napoleon; he was commander of the Russian forces occupying France after Waterloo; he personally settled the debts his officers ran up in Paris from 1815 to 1818; he took on and defeated the countries of the Caucasus. In The Sabres of Paradise (1960), Blanch described Vorontsov as 'the apotheosis' of his family: It was as if many generations were all embodied or crystallised in this arrogant, astute and ruthless yet high-principled man. He was an enigmatic figure, coldly handsome, a great milord in the English manner, haughty and reserved. He seldom smiled and never lost his air of bland calm.

Among the files recently released by the National Archives are a collection of papers relating to Alger Hiss and Whittaker Chambers. MI5 was unsurprisingly interested in the court proceedings involving the two men, and in Chambers's subsequent and widely-read book about his espionage days, Witness. Among the files is a report of an MI5 interview with Rebecca West in January 1951. She was at the time writing a book about Klaus Fuchs, but as her interviewer points out she didn't ask anything of him in relation to the Fuchs case.

From the terrace at Cliveden, with its western and southern panorama, the Thames and its floodplain are partly obscured by woodland, and so yesterday you couldn't judge the extent of the flooding in the valley below. But that didn't appear to matter to the large number of people visiting the house and its gardens, on the first gale-free day in some time, many of whom had turned out to see what they could of the floods. Disaster tourism?

From the summer of 1996 until he died in July 1999, I worked for John Kennedy Jr at his monthly glossy magazine, George. ‘There's no one like you, Inigo,’ he said on the phone when he offered me the job. I was always going to take the post if he wanted to give it to me, but he had a way of never making it easy for anyone to say no.