I have to learn to write in words of one – um – syllable. I am too – er – pretentious. People keep telling me that. ‘OB,’ they say, looking all stern and disapproving (okay, mostly one syllable – anyway, I said I have to learn: I haven’t learned yet, I’m working on it) – looking all grim and censorious, ‘you are too pretentious. You use big words that you don’t know what they mean or that other people don’t know what they mean, and you only do it to be pretentious. You should be cool and ironic like us. We have 75 degrees and you have one, and that is why you are pretentious and we are cool and … Read the rest

Ian McEwan, July 19.

Inevitably, we’re going to start seeing around the preposterous political correctness that allows us to have radical clerics preaching in mosques and recruiting young people. We have been caught too much by a sense that we can just regard these clerics as being like English eccentrics at Hyde Park Corner.

So being ‘devout’ isn’t enough then? Huh.

I don’t buy the arguments in the Iraq war. What keeps getting forgotten here is that the people committing massacres in Iraq right now belong to al-Qaida…But the massacres in Iraq now are being conducted by al-Qaida against Muslims. I also think it’s extraordinary the way in which we get morally selective in our outrages. When there was