To these and a hundred other questions, a single answer presents itself. Word reaches the town of a possible new Messiah arising in the East: the great and mysterious Sabbatai Zevi, who “rode daily on a silk-saddled horse, with fifty runners before him”. The news lights a touch paper among the restive cabbalists of Goray. Exegesis is provided from the Zohar; signs and wonders are observed; a legate arrives on behalf of the new Messiah, then another. Soon the town is in a ferment. The End Times are coming! Their suffering is soon to end! Against the tide of millenarian fervour stands a single man: old Rabbi Benish, whose reputation still instils respect for the proper rites of Judaism. “But how will it all end?” he asks passing children. He mounts a final stand, and is beaten back by forces beyond his control.

In his place emerges a young prophetess; who is fought-over, married, and managed by successive self-appointed leaders of the new sect. As the improprieties amount, her visions intensify; driving the vicious cycle of millenarianism ever-faster. Soon the people “stopped buying houses and sewing heavy coats, as it would be warm in the land of Israel”. Kosher disciples are abandoned. The sect takes control of taxation and – by way of recompense – relaxes the adultery laws. Men surprise women bathing. Ecstatic dancing and drinking sweeps the town. The Rapture approaches.

And passes. A woman casually remarks that “maybe they should repair their houses and get this thing out of their heads: the Messiah is not coming to Goray”. But she is scolded and reminded that she is “a no-one and a person of humble origin”. Yet it soon transpires that Sabbatai Zevi has embraced the very forces from which he was supposed to liberate them. The town becomes divided against itself. Some produce further evidence in support of the False Messiah, others recant Judaism altogether; some try to rebuild their ruined institutions, others plunge ever deeper into sin. Soon Goray has become “a den of robbers and an accursed town.” But even as they confront their material dereliction, the people uncover a much worse problem: in attempting to summon the Messiah, they have instead summoned a genuine Demon into their midst.

Isaac Bashevis Singer originally wrote Satan in Goray in Yiddish in 1935, basing it on the historical Sabbatai Zevi, whose false-gospel of sexual liberation did indeed sweep through the Jewish communities of Eastern Europe. It is hard to imagine how the manuscript – by then serialised in English in New York – appeared to the reader after 1945. For it is a parable not just of religion but the power of false promises to sweep away institutions, and how the Siren call of licentiousness is so often heard through their crumbling walls.

It reveals the frequent paradox of high-utopianism: that “the generation before redemption has to be completely guilty, and goes to great lengths to commit every possible offence”. It unpacks how temporal power comes cloaked in prophecy; the importance of critical mass to overcome the individual; the sublimated power of teenage prophets; the venality of radical leaders; and the slow torture of cognitive dissonance as the tide retreats. It is impossible to count the number of times this prophecy has come true since its publication, or escape the feeling that its perennial warning should be heard across the political spectrum.

In the late 1930s, the British Embassy in Moscow was a diplomatic backwater. The Cold War had yet to begin, Stalin’s terror was at its height, and there was little scope for real diplomacy. It was not a place for those seeking career advancement. But for Fitzroy Maclean – then a rising star at the infinitely more important Paris Embassy – Moscow was a stepping stone towards an entirely private goal: visiting the closed republics of Central Asia. He was soon casting out on deep, unauthorised visits into the Soviet Union’s “Forbidden Zone” – a region with good claim to being one of the wildest on earth. Culturally, the ‘Stans had changed little since the advent of the Mongol invasions. The previous generation of British pioneers – the players of the “Great Game” of the nineteenth century – had passed themselves off as holy men or traders, often inventing grisly deaths when exposed.

Fitzroy alternately evades his bemused NKVD escorts, befriends them, and turns them to his advantage. Finding the entire garrison of one town to be illiterate, he flourishes a Moscow theatre ticket in place of a travel permit; and they are soon opening the very doors they are supposed to be keeping barred to him. He later arrives on the shores of Oxus so well-versed in official casuistry that the local authorities are soon rebuilding their ferry in order to take him across into Afghanistan. Only when attempting to cross into Communist China does his gift of bureaucratic creativity meet its match (“I’d been scored off badly,” he records bitterly). Nonetheless, he successfully demands that the NKVD provide him with a first-class compartment to return to Moscow.

The thousands of miles of rail journeys are the touchstone of this section of the book. When not a guest of the authorities, he is often confined to the “hard” carriages into which the old Tsarist rolling stock has been converted: rows of plain wooden bunks, where he is plied with vodka, conversation, music, inedible food; and at one stage even falls in love. These journeys often intersect with the capricious population movements carried out by the Soviet Union. Whole trains of different ethnicities pass by towards unknown destinations. These add extra poignancy to his account of the great cities of the Silk Roads: “It is only a question of time,” he writes, “before all that remains of a bygone civilisation is swept away”. In Bokhara, he finds a giant Soviet flag hoisted on the previous Emir’s “Tower of Death” – a double echo of the show trials then in full swing in Moscow.

The outbreak of the Second World War risks a rupture in his symbiotic relationship with authority. Being of more value as a diplomat than soldier, he is under no circumstances allowed to join up. Burying himself in the Foreign Office regulations, Fitzroy uncovers a spectacular way to game the system: by standing for Parliament. This he achieves with no experience or interest in British politics, informing his constituents they are unlikely to see much of him until after the war. Now a serving Member of Parliament, he enlists as a private and learns the army from the bottom up (one of only two “officer class” men to do so in the course of the war).

Soon rumbled, he is dispatched to Cairo, where a combination of guile and chance secures him a place in the newly-formed Special Air Service; becoming surely the only soldier in history to be seconded to Special Forces having never before seen active combat (“The next thing is to get trained,” he writes laconically). Soon he is striking out with David Stirling across 400 miles of desert towards Benghazi, then in Italian hands. Here Fitzroy makes up for his lack of operational nous by delving into his Central-Asian bluffing skills, barking his way past sentry-posts in an Italian so authoritative that it blinds the occupants to his British uniform. When the mission is on the point of discovery, he responds by giving the guard commander a thorough dressing-down – “We could be British saboteurs, carrying loads of high explosive!” – allowing the entire party to dissolve back into the desert.

This farce is succeeded by tragedy. Dispatched back to the same target via an even longer route – and in defiance of their own intelligence – they walk into an ambush. The party limps back through the desert, harried by aircraft; subsisting on a mouthful and a teaspoon of water a day. An absolute tenet of the SAS had been that they were not sent on suicide missions. And yet it turned out the operation has been as close to one as you can get: a mere diversion, hundreds of miles behind enemy lines. In perhaps the greatest insight of the book – or perhaps into his own underlying stoicism and loyalty – he writes that this “delighted us no less than surprised us” as the operation “had achieved its main object.” A similar sclerosis handicaps his later mission to kidnap a rogue Persian general in Isfahan. Staff Headquarters approve the most dangerous aspects of the mission, while vetoing his request to impersonate a Brigadier for the purposes; promising instead to send a real Brigadier in order to maintain the dignity of the rank.

The final third of the book recounts Fitzroy Maclean’s most famous war experience: being parachuted into Bosnia to liaise with Tito’s resistance movement. So little was known of Tito that he was sometimes assumed to be an acronym for an organisation, or a rotating position. Instead Fitzroy finds the real man, presiding over an intensely proud and energised Partisan movement. The Old Etonian and the professional revolutionary – although “initially shy” – soon form a close bond which is to endure for the rest of the War. Converting his Russian into Serbo-Croat, Fitzroy joins them in their “agreeably compact mode of life” – a lean, hunted existence in which the only material pleasure is plentiful rakija, including at breakfast. Even someone of his worldliness is impressed by the garrulous Yugoslavs, with their huge moustache and bottomless appetite for fighting Germans.

Soon he is criss-crossing Yugoslavia, being passed from one unit to the next; each more hospitable and curious about the outside world than the last. When he is taken away from them into the hyper-mobile world of military planning – flying via Italy to Cairo – he gleefully juxtaposes the black-tie dinners with the world he has just left. As the stakes are raised in Yugoslavia, Fitzroy’s new itinerary includes seeking out Churchill in villas from Puglia to Morocco; at one point having to chase him through the French invasion flotilla by speedboat to find him. Infiltrating back into Yugoslavia – with increasingly difficulty each time – he sees first hand in the results of strategic decisions take at the top table. As the war nears its endgame, the book builds into a heady vortex of diplomacy, politics, and national liberation.

It is impossible to do the memoir justice, not least as the likes of its contents and author will never be seen again. Fitzroy thought he was writing a valedictory note for the cultures he visited: only now, twenty three years after his death, does it appear he was also writing one for his own.

What did this spectrum look like in the past? Part of the titillation of old films is the drooping cigarette and ever-present cocktail. Period series like Mad Men neatly play on this frisson, teasing us with nostalgia for a life lived through the sybaritic filter of alcohol. Yet one question remains unanswered: if they drank too much by our standards, then what was too much by their standards?

A brutal answer is provided by The Lost Weekend. Hitting US cinemas in 1945 – written and directed by Billy Wilder – this slice of realism eviscerated America’s suspension of disbelief around drinking. It presents a pin-sharp psychological portrait of a failing writer and his fatal dance with hard liquor. We meet Don Birnam when he has been dry for ten days. He is truculent and manipulative, coldly playing on his brother’s and fiancée’s attempts at rehabilitation. “Just stop watching me all the time, you two!” he snaps. “Let me work it out my way! I’m trying!” When they find the hidden bottle, he quickly turns it to his advantage. “You think I wanted you out of the apartment because of that?” he snarls. “I resent that like the devil!” The brother snaps, and leaves town. The fiancée – hopelessly sunk in a bottomless pool of forgiveness – promises to return later.

Left alone, Don springs into action. When the old housekeeper passes for her wages, a demonic light comes into his eyes. “Money?” he says. “What money?” Thus equipped, he hits the streets in a state of gleeful complicity with himself. He is well known to the local tradesman – but, like tradesman the world over, they are also businessmen. “I can’t stop anyone, can I?” says the liquor-store owner. Soon Don is playfully hiding the contents of his brown paper bag under an innocent covering of fruit. The local barman’s weary resistance – “Your brothers says he ain’t paying for you no more” – also crumbles at the sight of ready cash. About to swoop on his first glass of rye, Don quickly composes himself and lights a cigarette. Then he swoops anyway.

Immediately, the poles switch. We see the other Don; voluble and eloquent, carrying everything before him. “Why don’t you lay off for a while,” says the barman, as he refills the glass. But Don is in his element now, lost in a visionary euphoria. “It pickles my kidneys, yes. But what does it do to my mind? It tosses the sandbags overboard so the balloon can soar!” His newfound lyricism pervades everything. “Out there it’s not Third Avenue any longer. It’s the Nile, and down it moves the barge of Cleopatra!” he rhapsodises, sliding into Shakespeare. A fellow regular – sassy working-girl Gloria – is mesmerised. “Glad to have you back with the organisation,” she quips pointedly.

And so begins the “Lost Weekend” of the title. Don drinks, and begs, and drinks again. With each glut of shame, the chasm of his self-loathing gapes wider. He steals from his neighbour’s purse in a restaurant, manically replacing the money with a rose. He stares at his typewriter but there is nothing to write; and is soon stumbling through the morning light in an attempt to pawn it. The production used hidden cameras to film the street scenes – not to underline not how strange the sight, was but how normal. Billy Wilder had recently seen Raymond Chandler fall off the wagon in just the same way: the film was something of an attempt to bring the issue to light. “He’s a sick person,” pleads Don’s fiancée. “He needs our help!”

Soon Don awakes in the terrifying surrounds of the local alcoholic ward, filmed on-location in Bellevue Hospital. We – and more so the contemporary audience – are hit with the realisation that Don is not just an individual case: he’s a microcosm of an endemic problem. “This is Hangover Plaza,” says a knowing male nurse. “Come later, there’s apt to be a little floor show around here.” And so the viewer is introduced to the acute mental torture of delirium tremens. The ‘DTs’ are often passed off as something of a joke (by 1989, it had even become the name of a beer). Not so the reality. “Delirium is a disease of the night,” says the nurse. “Good night…” Don later flees from what he sees taking place. Only when his own delirium sets in does the full horror of his situation become apparent. It took another nine years for an account of the same condition to appear in British cinema, in Hobson’s Choice.

Unsurprisingly, the The Lost Weekend faced intense negative pressure from the drinks industry: ranging from claims it would lead to reinstatement of prohibition to alleged mob pressure to destroy the negative. But instead it took the 1946 Academy Awards for Best Picture, Best Actor, and Best Director. It remains one of the few films to maintain a 100% critics rating on the Rotten Tomatoes review aggregator. And yet its title is far from a household name. Even as the norms of the 1940s have been left behind, Don’s self-confessed “moral anaemia” is perhaps still too real a warning for modern viewers reared on the enabling fictions of the health lobby.

The essence of Rootism is trusting in his own robust common sense over experts (“Intellectuals are very handy with words – less so, in my experience, when it comes to a bit of direct action!”). Alongside this sits his belief in optimism – “Let’s go!” – and its power to overcome technicalities. He freely admits to “no relevant experience” when putting himself forwards as manager of a football club because “the name of the game is motivation and psychology – and that I know about!”

As a self-identified Thatcherite, he espouses the free market when it’s making him rich – but isn’t averse to a dose of protectionism when its waters lap too close to his door (“Yours for the market economy within reasonable limits!”). Free speech – “however obnoxious” – is a must when it comes to National Front rallies but soon meets its limits when it threatens public morals. The public sector should be slashed – except, of course, for the police (“Soon the thin blue line will become the thick blue line!”). Regulation is necessary for society as a whole but shouldn’t impinge on the buccaneering spirit of Root and his kindred spirits (“I’ll get straight to the point,” he writes to Major General Wyldebore-Smythe of the Conservative Party. “What’s the price of getting an honour?” Rebuffed, he attempts to bribe the Liberals instead). These double standards collide most brilliantly when writing to offer condolences to an MP who has been “burglarised while out advocating for greater initiative among the Working Classes”. Britain, he writes, should be a “free country to those who can afford it”.

Like today’s populists, Henry rebounds happily into the arms of foreign authoritarians whom he perceives as bastions of a lost conservatism. “Pay no attention [to the liberal press],” he writes to General Haq, military dictator of Pakistan. “Most of us realise that a backward people such as yours needs, and appreciates, the smack of firm government.” Addressing his letter to “The Strong Man”, he receives a reply thanking him for “certain very pertinent views”. One wonders how many similar replies Nigel Farage has in his bottom drawer.

With the exception of General Haq, Henry Root regards abroad with some suspicion. He writes to the Greek Ambassador, asking if the activities of a certain Greek masseuse represent the cultural inheritance of “Plato the Great & General Alexander”. Yet he remains sensitive to any slights against Great Britain. To defend the national honour from jokes at the expense of British Leyland, he suggests renaming it “Japanese Leyland” following a manufacturing agreement with Honda. “There’s a long way to go until Britain once again rules the world,” he laments to General Haq. Until that moment comes, Root himself stands guardian over the embers of British exceptionalism. These he seeks to fan into life by means of a self-penned stage work, The English Way of Doing Things. What better subtitle could there be for the Brexit-Party rally on 31^st March 2019, which saw soggy renditions of Jerusalem echo around Parliament Square?

Whereas Henry Root relied on the Royal Mail to drum up support, his modern contrarian heirs have access to social media. Yet he too adopted replies from celebrities as a force-magnifier, co-opting any interaction for the purposes of further profile-building. Jimmy Goldsmith attained lifelong status as Henry Root’s “very good friend” by generously forwarding his letter to a book-publisher. Denis Thatcher became ensnared by an enquiry relating to the Royal Cinq Ports Golf Club. Twitter nurtures a similar partisanship, allowing enthusiastic amateurs on both sides of the Brexit fence to climb to prominence by hurried retweets and replies from large accounts. Even EU Supergirl is, in her own way, a minor heir of Henry Root.

The letters are shot through with moments of odd prescience. He pitches The Free Trade Association with a demonstration outside Westminster including “traditional, right-wing, two-nations activity” such as bellowing Latin insults at the children of miners. With the self-described “One-Nation” group having been ejected from the Tories, leaving the party in control of just such a classically-educated clique, he would surely be proud. At one point, he outlines a sociological project to “hop incognito through the door [of a ladies sauna] in a pair of ballet pumps and take unusual photos before ejection”. This is not far off the experience of Canadian users of ladies’ saunas in the era of Justin Trudeau. Yet for all his misdirected enthusiasms, at the heart of the letters is the reactionary paradox: he opposes more things than he supports. The most eloquent statement of his beliefs is found in a one-sentence letter to the Evening Standard: “I wish to protest most strongly about everything.”

Henry Root was not, of course, real; being instead the creation of expert misanthrope Willie Donaldson. But there is nothing unreal about Nigel Farage’s misanthropic desire to “protest most strongly about everything”. What better slogan could there be for a party claiming to unite people as disparate as Claire Fox and Anne Widdecombe? With each successive victory – from securing a referendum; to winning it; to mainstreaming No-Deal; to insisting on No-Deal – Farage has propagated a new crop of grievance from his etiolated store of nationalism. Now he dangles the sword of Damocles over any Brexit by threatening to split the Tory vote. With the unreflecting venality of Henry Root, he is likely demanding a peerage or ambassadorship as the price of his patriotism. If the pound of flesh doesn’t weigh heavily enough, he too will take his custom elsewhere. Like the bungling tradesman in satirical song The Gasman Cometh – who sets off a chain of events which eventually necessitates him repeating the same job the following week – Farage seems happy to return to the first tee of his political career, assisted by a stab-in-the-back myth directed at everyone but himself. If that happens, this latter-day Henry Root may find the Brexit movement has a new thing against which to protest most strongly: him.

A year later, the royal handlers are finding a somewhat different world reflected back at them – one more inaccessible and elitist than the monarchy has presented at any time since the 1950s. Rather than burnishing the monarchy’s popular credentials, Meghan has damaged them with exposure to the most excessive double-standards of celebrity culture. Sir Humphrey finds he has been played, and that the institution he was attempting to safeguard has been subject to a reverse takeover.

The speed of the backlash has been revealing. For all its remoteness and pomp, successful royalty rests on a certain unspoken intimacy between monarch and subject: a sense that, beneath the layers of ermine, there lies an understanding of life – including your own. This intimacy was cleverly brought to the fore as the British Royal Family modernised in the post-war years. The Queen was shown doling out a picnic from the boot of a Land Rover. Even Princess Margaret unwittingly did her bit, being snapped sweeping by on waterskis. The public responded with an intimacy of their own: marking hatches, matches, and dispatches as if for their own family. Underpinning the transaction is an honesty: the royals don’t pretend to be what they are not, and in return we love them for what they are. We know we can’t join the picnic but don’t mind, as we feel we are there already.

Now that painstaking work is being undone at an alarming rate. The layers of relatability are being stripped bare, and our delicate suspension of disbelief is collapsing under the weight of a different type of cognitive dissonance imported from Hollywood. Jet-setting eco-warriors and velvet-roped egalitarians have long been the target of snide private comment. Yet by hitching that world to the gilded carriage of the Royal Family, Meghan has turned herself into a new lightning rod for anti-elitism. The upheavals of 2016 turned partly on the suspicion that modern progressive egalitarianism is merely elitism in disguise. The wokeing of the Windsors seems to provide irrefutable evidence this is true. The result is a kind of #MeToo moment for normal people, who are finally able to give voice to their long-suppressed dislike of the celebrity virtue mill.

Their response – to retreat higher up the ivory tower in search of defenders – is only sending the couple further down the vicous cycle of their unpopularity. A character reference from Elton John or Ellen de Generes is hardly the panacea for a charge of being an out-of-touch luvvie. Such “A”-listers also have their own popularity to worry about. The celebrity marketplace is a brutal one, where social capital is painstakingly guarded and reinvested. The global PR elite will currently be carrying out a quiet reassessment of the Sussexes, and seeking to isolate their clients from contagion.

With the couple’s renewed attempts at authenticity likely to be greeted with cynicism – lifting the ban on petting their dogs, perhaps? – this process is hard to arrest. A genuine embrace of the quietude they claim to seek, followed by a chastened re-emergence in the shadow of William and Kate, would be the traditional solution. But such restraint may prove too hard a cold turkey after such a rich diet of global attention. The alternative seems to be becoming a kind of alternative pole – and running sore of embarrassment – to the main family, like a latter-day Duke of Windsor.

Either way, Meghan and Harry have offered the world a cautionary tale in the limits of what can be synthesised in the celebrity sphere – and a stark reminder that royals and celebrities stand not on the shoulders of giants, but on those of the little people whom they serve.

“Hm,” you say, quietly sizing up his bike. “That’s an Eagle 4000, isn’t it?” At this, your neighbour’s space-age head notices you for the first time.

“Yeah,” it grunts, oblivious to the fact you’ve lifted the information from where it’s printed on the frame. You take his confirmation as an invitation to inspect the machine a little most closely.

“Interesting choice,” you say ambiguously. “I suppose Eagle have finally dealt with the old lateral torsion issue?”

“What?” says the head, leaning forwards.

“Oh, nothing really,” you say reassuringly. “Just that with the wrong body geometry, it can play havoc with your synovial joint. Happened to a friend. Never raced again!”

The head twitches in alarm then transfers its attention to your own bicycle.

“What’s that then?” it asks contemptuously.

“Oh, this?” You glance down as if noticing for the first time the old frame, its humble origins obscured by duct tape. “Just a little something my mechanic knocked together for town work.” You give the brakes a familiar heave, and prime the peddles for departure. As he sizes up this proposition, the lights change. You ride briskly off, leaving your adversary in a welter of car horns and newfound fears for his synovial joint.

Note what has happened. You have arrived at the encounter poorer, less fit and less well-equipped. Lycra-man, by contrast, is a more successful human being. Deep in your embittered soul, you know this: and it shall not stand. So, knowing in your heart you cannot rise to his level, you set about stripping him of that well-earned sense of fulfilment. It matters little that you have only thrown mud at the dam of your own inferiority. For that one precious moment, you are one-up and he is one-down! But the moment will pass. Before long you will need another hit of temporary victory. And another. And another. Yet as a path to the top, the method is illusory; because while you appear to ascend, you are in fact just treading others down.

The name for such techniques is, of course, Gamesmanship: a phrase coined by the comic writer Stephen Potter as the title of his eponymous 1947 book. It is perhaps not a coincidence that it emerged in the depths of the postwar years, from a world defined by rationing and ruled by spivs. Britain’s illusion of easy superiority had been shaken to the core: the book was even written during a week-long power cut. In the same year, the imperial jewel of India was being plucked from her crown. America – whose well-groomed serviceman had flooded the UK at the end of the war – was clearly to be the new cultural standard-bearer. With their material and political stilts kicked away, how could Britons still be seen to win? In his own small way, Stephen Potter provided an answer: they could deploy their intangible assets to bamboozle the world into submission. The British would not necessarily be one-up – but others would still be one-down.

If this is starting to sound familiar, it should. The ascent of Boris Johnson to within bullshitting distance of Downing Street is a victory of gamesmanship and little else. Like the vulnerable world of the 1940s, his Svengali-like social skills indicate not strength but weakness. Then as now, it is an ephemeral strategy which staves off decline by cloaking shortcomings rather than addressing them. It soon becomes an addiction, only begetting more of itself; and grinds the world down into cognitive dissonance as the illusion becomes more obvious (“Is this person for real?” wrote Jeremy Vine when his own moment of realisation came). As it was in the 1940s, lifemanship is a toxic by-product of the class system – borrowing the attributes of the gentleman not to uphold standards of decency but to subvert them. It is noblesse oblige without the oblige; rugged individualism without the ruggedness.

This is why Boris elicits such an extreme reaction on the Left. Because they intuit something worse even than privilege: namely the aggressive subversion of privilege for personal advancement. Neither is there anything conservative in this world-view: it is fact profoundly anti-conservative, because it disregards the restraint and responsibility on which a self-regulating society is built. Instead Boris prides himself on generating externalities; be they broken marriages, love-children, parking tickets, broken alliances, or diplomatic gaffes. His Libertarianism is entirely false. He could not succeed on a level playing field, and he could not survive without a wider power to pick up after him. The phrase “nanny state” could hardly me more apt than when it comes to cleaning up after Boris. And yet not generating externalities would mean playing by the rules: hence he creates as many as he can – just to show he’s getting away with it.

The obvious question is: why? Why would an intelligent person endowed with the cast-iron confidence of Eton and Oxford need to trample so publicly on the very values which had created them?

First, it is a mistake to say Eton instils universal confidence. Arriving among barons and billionaires – least of all as a “one man melting pot” touting a scholarship, as Boris did – can also instil profound insecurity. Witnessing what Rory Stewart called “the wrong type of Etonian” (namely one who privatises the gains of their position and externalises the costs) they determine to out do them at the same activity. And the more so, the better.

Second, the audience for gamesmanship is never the world at large, who are the mere fall guys. The real audience is the other initiates. In Boris’s case, these are not the snapping Marxists of the Labour Party (who, possibly alone, are likely to take his act at face value). They are instead people from his own background with no scales before their eyes, and yet who are powerless to stop him. To them he lays down the challenge: “Look how far my bullshit has got me. Nearly to Number 10! How far has yours got you?” As a result, the Left’s dislike is echoed even more deeply in the heart of Boris’s own milieu.

Whether by coincidence or not, BBC iPlayer is currently carrying the film version of Stephen Potter’s work: School for Scoundrels. Yet at the most crucial moment, the producers depart from their source material: in the final scene of the film, the hero renounces gamesmanship. Stephen Potter, played by Alastair Sim, is aghast. “Not sincerity,” he mutters. Yet the recrudescence of truth proves more enduring than all the mendacity of the precious ninety minutes. The hero finally gets the girl by honest means – with what appears to be enduring results. If Boris wants to get the girl – us – a similar turn of honesty in the next two weeks might help.

Over a period of three hours, the widest cross-section of Londoners strip down to their essentials. Literal and figurative sang-froid is the keynote. Event swimmers make glancing references to their weekend conquests and discuss the finer details of their anti-chafing strategies, while others haul on trunks bought on the last holiday. The professions appear in waves, starting with the bankers and finishing with the writers. Talk in the changing room ebbs and flows, with water temperature replacing the weather as the surest common ground. Politics – and anything else that risks disturbing the esprit-de-corps – are best avoided (after all, what could be more serious than swimming itself?). In an era where shared spaces are viewed as inherently sexualised, the experience is about as un-erotic as an Irish farming conference.

Slipping out to cross the lakeside promenade – swim-suited but still dry – is the most concentrated moment of awkwardness, leaving you open to greetings of fully-clad members of the public. But the water is a release. During the best season – now – it is astringent without being shocking. For the first ten strokes, you think of nothing else. The smell is stark and reviving; clean yet shot through with traces of flora and fauna. Since the Olympics – when the bowl of Serpentine was treated to allow for its use in the competition – the water has stayed fresher longer into the summer.

There is something primordial about the water’s-eye view of London. You are lower than the dog walkers and early tourists, yet can see further along the lake; towards where the Houses of Parliament and an arc of the London Eye break incongruously through the tree line. On a sunny day, the low arches of the Serpentine Bridge are lit spectacularly by the morning sun, their undersides painted by reflections. Across on the north shore, dust trails rise from morning horse-riders. True to the club’s minimalist organising principals, the “pen” of buoys does not apply (it instead represents the border of the daytime lido). This means freedom to cast out towards the bridge, and become the unspoken counterpart to the cafe customers lining the shore. The further from dry land, the more dead-pan the “good morning” you receive passing a fellow member. Swimming with a friend provides a natural pacemaker, and heads off the temptation to get out too soon. The real test of when you should get out is when any sense of cold is long forgotten, and you feel you could swim forever.

You emerge from the water with your senses sparkling and self-consciousness forgotten to stride purposefully across the tarmac like Byron fresh from the Hellespont (it’s no coincidence that machismo and mental clarity coincide in both Romantic poetry and open-water swimming). The changing-room patter which had grated on your earlier self is now the most natural thing in the world; and the small population of dogs and bicycles grouped around the door feel positively homely. You pull away on your bike full of Spartan enthusiasm for the day, stripped of mental chaff, with your body still lean from the cold. After a few mornings of the new season, your first thought on waking is not coffee but the waiting water. In a world which rushes to offer ever more complicated ways to optimise body and spirit, a morning swim remains hands-down the best life hack of them all.

Indeed, like many Italians, Barzini treats anything beyond a purely geographical definition of ‘Italy’ with some degree of scepticism. This is a country ruled not by national sentiment but by the age-old principle of capalinismo. Meaning loyalty to your local campanile – bell tower – it emerges as the defining factor of Italy’s achievements and woes (it is still common to see rooms advertised in Italy only open to locals). The dividends of the Renaissance were driven not by cooperation but by the fierce internal loyalty and external mistrust of the city states. Their competitiveness invited cataclysms from which the country never recovered. First among these was when the warlord of Milan invited the French Army into Italy in 1494; a guileful act by which he hoped to do down his rivals, which instead shattered the peninsula with six decades of abasement at the hands of foreign armies. And these were real armies, which scorched the earth; nothing like the prancing condottiere who had once harmlessly sated the city states’ desire for glory. Within twenty years, Rome itself was subject to a six-month ordeal of rape and destruction; within thirty, the peninsula’s bitter internal jealousies had turned on its richest jewel: Venice.

Barzini accordingly offers a thrillingly detailed account of the events of 1494 – and, in the surrounding chapters, draws out from them some central lessons of Italian life. Foremost among these is a comparison between the two great writers on statecraft who emerged from the period of the Italian Wars: Niccolo Machiavelli and Francesco Guicciardini. In spite of his eponymous adjective, it is the republican Machiavelli who is presented as the hopeless idealist; forever dreaming of a unified Italy which could resist assault, and ending his life in exile. The aristocratic Guicciardini, by contrast, consolidates his position at the top of society by never allowing his private ideals – and religion – to inform his public choices. As such, the Guiccardini-Strozzi landholdings survived not just the treacherous Medician period but are still producing wine to this day.

It is no surprise that Guicciardini reappears in the chapter “How to Succeed” – and that this represents a masterpiece of cynicism. Never trust anyone outside your family; never speak plainly; use powerful friends and flattery at all times. Align yourself to the quality of the furbo – cunning man – not the credulous fesso (fool), who alone among Italians pays his taxes, keeps his word, and believes what he reads in the papers. Barzini acknowledges that any country – even Italy – needs a minimum number of such people in order not to fall apart, and foresees this moment approaching as their number diminishes.

Yet – although this furbizia may be the underlying principle of Italian life – its enaction requires mastering the most Olympian virtue of all: garbo. This untranslatable quality indicates a combination appearance, bearing and worldliness, which sweeps all before it. It is “the careful circumspection with which one slowly changes political allegiance when things are on the verge of becoming dangerous; the tact with which unpleasant news must be announced; the grace with which the tailor cuts a coat to flatter the lines of the body; the sympathetic caution with which agonising love affairs are finished off; the ability to restore order to a rebellious province without provoking resentments.”

Foreigners should tread carefully. Barzini lovingly records the typical arc of experience of a foreigner moving to the country; initially delighting in how beautiful everything is and how easily the tradesmen greet him (what a contrast with France!). Only gradually does the realisation dawn that he is being cosseted by a carefully-drawn artifice. At best disillusionment sets in; at worse, the collision of underlying values leads to disaster. He proffers the example of a high-minded English family who decide to provide for the welfare of their distraught maid when she falls pregnant. But, within weeks, furious writs and lawsuits start arriving from her family. They have arrived at the only logical conclusion known to them: the Englishman himself was the father. Having smelt money, they were not going to miss out. And so, the English family departs Tuscany, leaving an irreparable hole in the social fabric.

Illusion and reality entwine most closely in his chapter on the Sicilian Mafia. The belated realisation of Machiavelli’s dream of unification in 1871 forced underground the local armed bands which had which protected the large estates. Resistant to the new authority being imposed from the north, these became the “primordial and Arcadian form of the mafia, with its mixture of ruthless brutality and noble sentiments”. Barzini dissects these self-delusions with a pitiless irony, as he maps the thoughts of an ageing mafioso of the old school: “The good ones are unfortunately getting scarcer. Things are no longer what they were. More and more men seem bent on violating the old rules merely to make money for themselves. It is not so much the Mafia’s fault as that of the times. Similar trends are visible everywhere in the modern world. All men are inclined to serve their private interests and forget moral duties. Nevertheless, good Mafia men still exists: those who want, above all, to be helpful to others. This they consider their mission in life.” And so it is here – in the pit of Italy’s dark heart and among its most famous export – that the suspension of disbelief finally becomes complete.

Barzini’s message to the visitor is to recognise that Italy is so full of small comforts because this is all its people can trust. Its culture has been worn down like a sea pebble, leaving ephemeral beauty and pleasure as not only the highest but the only available virtue. The same themes appear in later books – notably John Hooper’s, also called The Italians (likely in homage to Barzini and shared scepticism of the idea of ‘Italy’). Written almost exactly 50 years later, it provides a perfect companion volume; showing the wounded splendour of Italy still echoing forwards through the centuries.

Eric Ambler’s seminal transformation of the spy thriller has been well-documented. Before his advent in the years straddling the Second World War, the genre had wrung whatever action it could from thinly-drawn plots and characters. Yet by the time The Spy Who Came in From the Cold was released in 1963, these books had become diaphanous puzzles of character, politics and morality. Once mere pulp entertainment, the espionage novel became a camera obscura for its era – thanks, in large part, to Eric Ambler.

Perhaps, he had a more nuanced political sensibility than his predecessors. Whereas they had been ruddy imperialists, he was of the Left. The resulting willingness to point up the covert influence of financial capital on global affairs – rather than simply that of state actors or crime syndicates – provides added dynamism to his plots. But the staying power of his books is not rooted in politics alone. Underpinning them is also a bottomless fascination with the individual’s scope for self-delusion. Hence in The Mask of Dimitrios – his most famous work – we meet the grotesque Mr Peters who, throughout his various careers in heroin dealing and extortion, speaks in terms of what he refers to as “the Higher Things”. His moral and physical decay is complete, yet he appears sincere in the belief that he is engaged with the greater causes of human life.

Nearly two decades later, Eric Ambler returned to the same theme, this time placing it centre stage. The Light of Day – written in 1962 – recounts the experiences of small-time Anglo-Egyptian hustler Arthur Simpson. Whereas the earlier books are narrated by honest men thrown into dishonest situations, here we are treated to a full first-person narrative by one of the most wretched and misguided individuals ever to walk the shores of the Eastern Mediterranean.

The result is a psychological sketch of brutal acuity, wrapped in a comic masterpiece.

Like Mr Peters before him, Arthur Simpson is a sensitive man who attracts a disproportionate degree of bad luck and injustice. His character has been formed at a small boarding school where he was “taught how to hate; and it was the cane that taught me”, giving him a pathological need for revenge. Having fraudulently sold an inherited business – “Mum was entirely responsible for the trouble I got into over that” – he turns to publishing magazines of a “literary nature”. This too shortly gets him arrested. “I would remind you,” as he frostily informs a Turkish police chief, “that books like Ulysses and Lady Chatterley’s Lover were also once considered to be pornographic or obscene”. Released from prison and deported to Egypt, he falsely denounces his business partner as a spy in return for a new passport. By the time we meet him, he is dragging his feet along the bottom of Athens society, turning tricks as a driver and tour guide.

His activities don’t progress very far along the arc of criminal ambition before meeting their match. Apprehended in the act of raiding his client’s hotel room, he is press-ganged into action on behalf of larger and sleeker forces. His one task is to cross an international border; a feat he attempts without a valid passport. “The whole thing became utterly disastrous,” he says, “certainly through no fault of my own”. Comprehensively exposed by the Turkish Secret Service, he is let back into the water as their newly-minted intelligence asset.

Forcing an unwilling man into a dual role which far exceeds his capabilities is at the very epicentre of Eric Ambler’s interests as a writer. Where The Light of Day differs from his other writing is that it also forces the reader into an unfamiliar role. Whereas it is easy to sympathise with the mild-mannered teachers and writers who provide the foils in his other books, how can we do the same with Arthur Simpson?

And yet, like Arthur himself, we are left with no choice; as his humanity is soon squeezed to the surface by the inhuman pressures of intelligence work. We follow his swings from hatred to an almost canine loyalty to his new masters; from depression at failure to euphoria when he uncovers something he considers relevant. We feel his bruising when – having committed the cardinal sin of an intelligence source and turned his mind to qualitative judgement – he is castigated instead of praised. We share the wincing humiliation when he overhears reference to himself from his better-groomed associates – and intuitively understand his longing for The Light of Day finally to fall on his life.

And so, in spite of everything, we are forced to stay the hand of judgement. Because the real amorality in Ambler is found not at the bottom of society but at the top; among those who set in motion the ineluctable processes of war and exploitation, knowing they will keep the gains and externalise the costs. His writing shows detailed research of the reality of heroin addiction or of internment in a labour camp. Here too is a reason he remains so popular: the Cold War may have come and gone but, as aircraft carriers again churn the seas and opioids fell people for legal profit, Ambler’s world is still our own.

That last phrase, which unconsciously locates shifting political attitudes within the context of the public school, could serve as a touchstone for Raven’s fiction. The ten-book Alms for Oblivion series addresses the management of decline through the prism of the establishment. In doing so, it revelled in the contradictions of elite Fabianism. We meet left-wing historian Tom Llewellyn, who lives in a basement despite marrying the daughter of a Tory grandee; Robert Constable, an aristocratic Cambridge provost who painstakingly concludes that independent thinking is as problematic as independent wealth; and Mayerston, a suave agitator who navigates wine lists as confidently as revolutionary theory.

If mendacity is Raven’s target, then conservative characters sit just as plumply within his cross-hairs. Their mental acrobatics are concerned more with personal ethics than politics: specifically, how to hammer their honour codes into a shape that will not impede their progress through life? The stock example is Peter Morrison, a stolid Norfolk landowner who muffles the skeletons in his closet well enough to proceed through the army to Parliament – but is not above engineering a gay crime passionel when required. Aristocratic Captain Detterling follows a similar career path yet, playing for higher stakes, is even more politely opaque. Only a very fine reading of the series reveals a possible manslaughter on the route to him inheriting a title.

Between the shortcomings of left and right wing morality lies a magnificent chasm inhabited by those not bothering with either. Foremost is the series’ most prominent Catholic, Somerset Lloyd-James; who plots out his most nefarious schemes on paper, flagged up by a personal scheme of hieroglyphs. He is of amphibious appearance and pays for sexual mise-en-scenes of startling originality, while at one point negotiating to become the “second-string” lover of an older woman. Swimming in even deeper waters is the gigolo Mark Lewson, whom we meet liberating money from a client to go gambling in Menton; and who successfully elopes with heiresses despite his kisses “tasting horrible”. Both these characters meet an end which fits the pattern of their lives

Such a cast would fly apart without some type of moral pivot. True to Raven’s saturnalian instinct, this is provided by Maisie the Prostitute. Her flat in Shepherd Market is a crossroads for nearly all the main characters, putting her in a position of unique power. Yet – alone in the series – she has a moral code and sticks to it, refusing the numerous opportunities for extortion laid before her. She even demurs from personal advancement – namely becoming a mistress to an aristocrat – because it would mean foresaking her other clients’ need for physical succour and emotional protection. “Whatever you do,” she says, tapping the chest of Fielding Gray before he departs on a trip she instinctively knows will be dangerous, “don’t let them know what’s in there”. He disregards her, and is savaged as a result.

Maisie’s preternatural wisdom points to the series’ deeper currents. Although he gleefully rejects Christianity, Raven’s profound respect for Greek culture – the only thing, in fact, he did respect – left room for a more pagan supernaturalism. He was too aware of hubris and poetic justice to embrace a wholly mechanistic world-view and risk paying the consequences.

As such, he grants his characters truthful visions, and makes them pay the price for disturbing the old gods, a circumspection that the characters themselves lack. Instead, those most able to protect their cultural inheritance are those most venal in pursuit of its destruction. Foremost is already-rich Lord Cantaloupe, who turns his country house into a theme park. We see The Odyssey being filmed as a Hollywood epic against the backdrop of Corfu’s mass tourism; the production funded by a progressive American foundation. The final novel is a detailed elegy to Venice, also gradually being destroyed by encroaching commercial appetites. Raven has obviously chosen it as a cipher for his life and work.

If Stendhal was right that a novel is a mirror walking down the main street, few have fulfilled the commission as searchingly as Simon Raven. His unsparing eye sits awkwardly not only in our time of artificial moral absolutes but also in his own. The books were the result of the indulgence of his publisher, for whom they apparently didn’t make much money. Pitching an equivalent to today’s publishing world would be a fool’s errand.

Mayfair’s two syllables are heavily freighted with associations; sybaritic and discreet, it is still the apogee of the Monopoly board. These fast associations were originally a quirk of London geography. It is bordered to the north by Oxford St, where Thomas de Quincy used to buy his opium; and to the south by Piccadilly, with its flower girls and ‘Dilly boys. Beyond Piccadilly is the clubland of St James, where country landowners came to shop and sleep, safe from rich food or intellectual conversation. Exerting its temptations on them was the area of the neighbouring May Fair, an annual spring festival synonymous with vice. It was moved away from the area in the mid-Seventeenth century on account of “riotous and disorderly behaviour”. Yet the imprimatur of its pleasure economy remains to the present day.

Only last year, a titan of the corporate world was removed for using a company credit card in one of the purple-lit doorways giving onto Shepherd Market. Had he opted for the more traditional cobbled environs of Market Mews, his career might have survived. It was there that a certain nobleman was said to have expired in the arms of his physical confessor. Knowing the patterns of his life, she picked up the phone to his club to impart the news. Her fellow hospitality professionals swiftly repatriated his body south of Piccadilly, where it was rediscovered in calm repose; swaddled by his favourite armchair in the Club library. Ah, people said on hearing the news: his Grace died happy.

One man credits himself with chasing Shepherd Market’s oldest trade indoors: Huseyin Ozer, founder of the Sofra restaurant chain. He arrived in the area in the late Eighties with a small loan and his eye on the corner location which remains his flagship. Yet the spot was also favoured by the area’s more long-standing professionals. His solution was to install Sofra’s trademark hanging flower baskets. By means of persistent overwatering, the pavements beneath were rendered useless to an activity reliant on make-up and careful presentation. “I was spending half my takings on flowers each month,” he says. “But it worked!” Such lateral thinking eventually won Huseyin thirty restaurants around Europe and a trademark black Lamborghini. His ambition is to have a corner cafe in heaven – but cannot be drawn on whether it will require the same founding techniques as Sofra Mayfair.

The area’s fulcrum is Berkeley Square. Its sloping geography, dense canopy and Georgian town houses present as a raffish cousin to the calm rationalism of Grosvenor Square. Traffic sluices around its broad corners in an echo of the postprandial racing laps performed by the Bentley Boys in the Twenties. Their twin homes were the Jack Barclay dealership and Morton’s Club. Both are still there; the first performing its original function and the second revived in a wan pastiche of its former self. The “Berkeley-Square lap” entered sufficiently into motoring mythology to be used by Ford for an advertising campaign in the Eighties.

Across the square lies the place which most epitomised Mayfair’s international cachet. Founded by Mark Birley in 1963, Annabel’s Club was the sine-qua-non of fast living for nearly fifty years. “We got married in Castel’s,” reminisces on Mayfair regular, referring to Paris’s premium fleshpot. “But we met in Annabel’s.” The champagne was served in wine glasses to reduce trips to the bar. The starlit corner dance-floor perfectly curated towards the needs of a certain type of gentleman and his younger partner.

The floors above contained London’s most notorious casino, the Clermont Club; where scions of the aristocracy gambled away their patrimonies as tigers from the owner’s zoo strolled past. It is said that Sir David Stirling – co-founder of the Special Air Service – survived Rommel but was not so lucky at the Clermont Club. The eponymous Mayfair Set has since given its name to a documentary series about the period. Although snide and deterministic, its access to archive footage of Mayfair is compelling. If Annabel’s first history was shot through with tragedy – the Mayfair set left suicide and murder in its wake, as well as destitution – it has now been reborn as farce. Since its sale last decade, Annabel’s has been relaunched as a supercharged parody; a surreal, multi-story world complete with bouncers dressed as Tweedledum. Like Morton’s and a slew of other pretenders, its mission is rendered useless by the presence in Shepherd Market of Annabel’s true progeny: 5 Hertford St, opened by Robin Birley in 2012, whose massive social gravity is now felt across world.

Yet Mayfair’s many resident imitators will be able to trade happily on its name until the Apocalypse and beyond. The building crane has provided a hardy breed during these years of apparent political uncertainty, with entire blocks being rebuilt from the ground up. For an area with Mayfair’s centuries of bankability, Brexit is just another passing season.

At any other time in the past forty years, such a national tragedy would automatically bring people together. But as the fire took hold, it was more than just a tragedy: it was a cipher for France herself. After years of terror and months of rioting, the country’s public torture had entered a new and unthinkable register. In a different part of our being, the wheels of interpretation start to turn. France is a secular nation that remains deeply attached to national symbols. Numinous but deeply-held French national pride has had little true sustenance for years.

President Macron is already held responsible for the flames that have been licking at Paris, and the suicidal despair licking at the countryside. And now the country faced a psychological earthquake so deep that the brusque race of Parisians cried in the streets. It was a scene could have been projected straight from the imagination of the Front National.

And yet in the depths of trauma, France reached for hope. The usually silent Catholic majority gathered to pray; on their knees and in song. By midnight, their prayers were answered: not by material survival but by the sight of a single cross, gleaming down the length of the nave. Here I am, it said: I have risen from this Calvary as I did before. The planned Presidential speech would only have provided another ratchet in the cycle of national recrimination. Instead, France absorbed something no politician can ever offer: a profound, searching catharsis after years of seemingly inescapable agony.

Already we have found signs of rebirth. With commitments to rebuild came the sense that France has finally passed her nadir. The Gilets Jaunes cannot now revert to violence. Macron cannot speak down to his people; or lay a baton to them; or penalise them economically over Brexit. Whatever Jihadist cells lurk in the banlieus would be unwise to become operational. By the same token, individuals motivated towards Islamophobia, anti-Semitism, or any stripe of religious violence will be met with contempt – not least a continuance of the ongoing attacks on France’s national churches. If criminality is announced at Notre Dame, many of the above words may of course be unwritten. But I believe this will not happen.

France – so painfully exposed to assault from outside – has finally been humbled from within. Macron did not think twice before extending his appeal to the technical and financial resources of the wider world. The rhetoric of a shared European inheritance has a focus when it is most needed. The Queen will be recalling the Windsor Fire of 1992 and contemplating her response to the people of France. French nationals in self-imposed London exile will be feeling the tug of their abandoned motherland. The Catholic Church – both in France and beyond – has a focus both of contrition and thanksgiving. France’s strident secular-humanist movement will offer conciliation for months if not years. The torrents of European political life have a calm pool where they may meet. France’s most precious treasure has been sacrificed – and given back to her a symbol of unity beyond all imagination.

Craven flirts with the idea of hiring a prostitute. You need money for love, he thinks. Bayswater’s connection with the sex trade has not lapsed. In the old days, punters would be entertained in the back of a van as it was driven around Hyde Park. You paid by the lap. Now university-age Russian girls skip out of scuffed German saloons with tired-looking drivers. In Ken Russell’s first film A House in Bayswater – a noir-ish documentary which seems to contain the germ of all his future work – one of the tenants shoots nudie pics on the roof. Stories of the area’s libertine past still abound. In the 1970s, Polish model Elizabeth ran a nightclub on Bayswater Road. On her birthday, the regulars would strip off their clothes, throw them down on the dancefloor, and set fire to them. She says that for all her years under Communism, she has never lived in a society as controlled as modern Britain.

In recent years, Bayswater’s Romanian presence has rocketed. Groups of young men from Wallachia and the Black Sea coast stand on Westbourne Grove late at night, smoking cigarettes in a wide circle. If you stop to chat, a spokesman appoints himself, discussing the opening of a Romanian restaurant just across the border in Notting Hill.

The survival of a hard frontier with this smarter neighbour is testament to Bayswater’s quiet traction. In pubs such as The Prince Edward and The Cleveland Arms, conversation still thrives. The Monkey Puzzle on Sussex Gardens is a favourite of sunburned West-Country visitors spilling from the main line at Paddington. Yet the firmest pillar of the area’s social life is the Tiroler Hut, an irresistibly kitsch Austrian restaurant which hasn’t changed its formula of lead-heavy food and schlager in fifty years. Octogenarian Croat regular Ivo has been propping up the bar and accepting donations of šljivovica for decades. When Brazilian street-sweeper Carlos has finished jiving along the pavement behind his Technicolor shades, he has a drink in the Tiroler Hut.

Around the corner lies Queensway, the neighbourhood’s uneasy artery. It was there that a Chinese restauranteur once cheerfully offered a ten-percent discount to a customer horrified by the presence on his plate of a deep-fried cockroach. At the mid-point of the street stands Whiteley’s shopping centre. Moored like a once-great ocean liner waiting for the breaker’s yard, it has become a forlorn throwback to the days before Amazon; complete with Union flags fluttering stoically in the breeze. At the top of Queensway sits the Porchester Baths, where the dank, green-tiled steam rooms present like something from an Alan Hollinghurst novel transposed to the Lubyanka.

It is a village of villages. The presence on Moscow Road of the Greek Orthodox cathedral has given rise to a small aggregation of Hellenic businesses. Like nearby St Petersburg Place, the street is named for the export destination of the gravel once quarried there. A second religious foundation, the Tyburn Convent, exists at Bayswater’s south-east corner. The order was founded to pray for the souls of Catholics martyred at the Triple Gallows of Tyburn, which stood on the present site of Marble Arch. You can now email the nuns a prayer-request.

Carried by the rip tide in London property, Bayswater’s housing market is in slow flux, with only the healthy crime-rate providing a brake. The tall terraces are cheaply built, containing high-ceilinged flats which are too cold in winter and too hot in summer. On Inverness Terrace, high-powered barristers rub shoulders with backpackers, and sweet smoke enwreathes the plane trees on a summer evening. In anticipation of eventual parity with Marylebone and Notting Hill, investors are buying up the neighbourhood’s old boarding houses and hotels, cashing out the previous cabal of Iraqi and Lebanese landlords.

But it is hard to imagine Bayswater ever fully sanitised. Like Kilburn or Chalk Farm, its ambiguous nature is too stubborn to be swept away by development. Perhaps W2 will finally take its place among the smart Central-London postcodes, and the slumbering twenty-year-old cars be replaced by a brusque new generation. But the lifeblood of cheap tourism will still oxygenate Queensway with tackiness, the world’s oldest trade still be plied, and the ghost of Craven always find a resting place.

Pilgrimage is unique in being both an outwardly-focused and an inwardly-focused activity. Pilgrims follows a pre-ordained route which – like a monastic rule – frees them from physical choice. They are willingly subsumed in a community of equals – an individual pilgrim pod or a pilgrim route – and humble themselves to the continuity of generations which have sanctified their final destination. As physical ambitions are reduced to the essential, the senses become attuned. The natural and human world through which you pass cease to be a distraction and become a source of insight. Because pilgrimage is about contemplation, it is also about transformation. Hence it is one of the most perennial religious practices; appearing across Judeo-Christian, Islamic and Buddhist traditions. A journey interdependent on other pilgrims is physically, socially, and spiritually liberating. From such freedom comes self-knowledge and change. And not a one-off change: the pilgrimage becomes a pivot to which the mind returns, renewing itself once again.

The practice has survived numerous historical encroachments. The Reformation attempted to stamp it out on the basis of idolatry – surely leading to Pythonesque inquisitions of innocuous Seventeenth-Century travellers. The USSR went further, expropriating the practice by centring it on Lenin’s mausoleum. Now ‘pilgrimage’ is often associated with modern personality cults. London’s Abbey Road Studios is the number-one destination for Beatles’ fans. A series of shrines to George Michael has more recently sprung up to in Highgate. Each national church of George Michael has a different section, with tributes drawn from its language and culture. When adherents meet there, they are exhilarated (the end of a pilgrim journey is always a moment of release: in the Catalonian monastery of Montserrat, arriving pilgrims danced ecstatically before the altar). Even the drab concrete annulus erected to the memory of Princess Diana in Kensington Gardens sows camaraderie. It connects visitors to each other via their connection to something greater.

The opportunity for bonding is a key component of the modern pilgrim revival. Europe’s most famous pilgrim route – to Santiago de Compostella – has acquired cult status, driving a near 300-fold increase in use over the past 30 years. It is, by all accounts, a cheery ecumenical bunfight, on which people of all beliefs and backgrounds swap tales (and bunks – fittingly, given that ‘licentiousness’ was among the Reformation’s original injunction against pilgrimage). The historical resonances of Santiago as a pilgrim destination – on the cusp of first Moorish Spain and then the New World – remain somewhat diffused along the column of backpackers.

A narrower gate is found at the other end of the Mediterranean world: Mount Athos, a peninsular in northern Greece which is the spiritual seat of the worldwide Orthodox church. It was chosen by the first hermits for its inaccessibility – and it remains inaccessible. Access requires a stamp issued by the office of the Ecumenical Patriarch in Istanbul (a process described by Robert Byron in The Station). Yet accommodation itself must be organised with the individual monasteries, which are – in the spirit of subsidiarity – highly idiosyncratic. One may inform a telephone caller that it is far too late to book for a given date; another, that it’s far too early. The stripping away of physical distraction extends to an injunction against women, which has been challenged by the EU. Even female animals are forbidden – because the monks are largely vegetarian and pescatarian, making animal husbandry extraneous. What remains is a purified consciousness that has given Mount Athos the highest life-expectancy in the modern world.

For all its immutability, one arrives on Athos to find renewal. Pilgrims are whisked along dirt roads in Mercedes people-carriers with monks at the wheel. Bobbing at the ancient stone quay of Vatopedi – monastery-of-choice for Prince Charles and President Putin – is a twin-engined powerboat for VIPs. One visitor told me that he hadn’t bitten his nails once on the peninsular. Our guide – an avowed atheist who was on this fifth ‘last’ visit to Athos – wept when we left. It seems that the circumspection and historicism of Athos exert an appeal that transcends individual belief.

The more grandiose promises of Catholic healing shrines inevitably rest on a narrower constituency. Pilgrim-destinations such as Lourdes (France), Czestochowa (Poland), and Medjugorje (Bosnia) function as barometers of overall religiosity. Hence the overall decline of Lourdes was bucked in the crash year of 2008, while traffic to Czestochowa has risen with the overall religious revival gripping Poland. Yet the decades-long increase of Santiago bears no such correlation. This brings us to the question: what is distinct about pilgrimage? If we strip out faith, what remains to drive the revival among secular populations? And how can these universal aspects be extracted and refined?

It is an issue to which a recent organisation, the British Pilgrim Trust, has set its mind. The Trust has harnessed renewed interest in folk culture to take people on one and two-day guided pilgrimages along Britain’s old ways. Its directors count one academic and one long-standing practitioner. The former is Dr Guy Hayward, an expert in the community-building aspects of music. The latter is Will Parsons, who once walked Britain’s Celtic fringe while funding himself by singing folk songs, pursued – unaware – by the national press. Its patron is Dr Rupert Sheldrake, whose new book Science and Spiritual Practice examines the neurological and sociological dividends of a range of religious practices, including meditation, gratitude, music – and pilgrimage.

Drawing on Rupert Sheldrake’s work, the Trust has developed an applied theory of pilgrimage. Its events are not history walks but a type of landscape therapy. This means harnessing nature, the built environment, and the group itself towards the realisation of private, internal goals. The experience is beyond ecumenical – the motto is ‘bring your own beliefs’ – yet seems to pay back more than a religious or even interfaith approach. The natural world becomes a source of powerful existential metaphors, which pilgrims are encouraged to apply to their own lives. The underlying theme is that pilgrimage only is a means to the end of personal transformation.

At the close of Rupert Sheldrake’s chapter on the science of pilgrimage, he makes two suggestions. One – unsurprisingly – is to go on a pilgrimage; whether it be structured, in the manner of the British Pilgrimage Trust, or extemporised. The second is more subtle: namely to turn your existing journeys into pilgrimages. This speaks to an odd paradox of the modern world: that the increased connectivity of commercial travel and tourism belies real connection between different cultures. The backpacker bars of Budapest are now indistinguishable from those of Thailand, ditto the business hotels. And yet we still profess that each place and people is uniquely valuable. Next time you travel, earth that value – and perhaps a personal intention – into visiting a unique place at your destination; and the spiritual air miles may soon be piling up.

Having assimilated this overarching bloody-mindedness, the visitor enters an environment replete with the quiet semiotics of an old institution. The famous uniform of stiff-collar-and-tails now has as many adornments as that of a minor military junta. A grey waistcoat with silver buttons means something very different from a coloured waistcoat. And so on. And on, and on. The Gormenghast-like vocabulary of the place is not even to be attempted.

To the boys, The Fourth of June means something very specific: girls. It is hard to describe the fervour that grips a male boarding-school house on waking to the prospect of an influx of maidenhood. Last-minute press-ups are performed and bottles of cologne emptied onto unshaven cheeks. Sisters are key intermediaries, distributing the coveted invitation among their clans. In the summer term of a girls’ school, even the bluest of blue stockings becomes the toast of their school year: if they have a brother at Eton. Once on the field of battle, only the bravest of either sex truly engage the enemy. Oiling the wheels of success and failure, the business of clandestine drinking is taken very seriously.

Or was. The organising principle of the day has changed from fecund chaos to a technocratic insistence that things pass off uneventfully. Family picnics – which once provided the central matrix for drinking and flirting – have been briskly consolidated into catered events by individual Houses. Parents were once lords of their own rug, entertaining whom and how they chose. Now they mill about awkwardly under a shared marquees like unwilling neighbours at a local cook-off. Where teenagers were once elevated to the level of adults, now adults are infantilised into the parameters of a school House. Housemasters are slippery as to whether this iniquity had evolved naturally or been imposed from above. Either way, a day that was once about giving back to the fee-payers is now ever-more about The Boys. They reciprocate with a recrudescence of teen indifference, slumping in unbuttoned waistcoats while their guests tire in the sun.

The day’s denouement is the Procession of Boats. The answer to why several dozen half-sober teenagers should have to stand up in a moving Eight, lift their oars vertically, then shake loose from their boating hats garlands of flowers is, of course: why not? The spectacle used to be greeted by a self-organising mass of half-drunk spectators, all baying eagerly for calamity. Now the guests’ glasses are taken from them on the way to the riverbank. A seated – and ticketed – enclosure has been erected, and the dead hand of Live Commentary been introduced. The brass band survives but is no longer centre stage. Without the moral support provided by the Boating Song and Happy Birthday – for George III, course – ever more of the crews seem to fall in.

But there is another way of looking at this: the change has been wrought not within the school but simply by growing up. Perhaps the 1200 souls of the five Blocks will enjoy this year’s Fourth of June as keenly as we did in the Nineties? Yet it’s hard to avoid the thought that Eton has diluted its exceptionalism to survive; or the hope that in some post-apocalyptic future, the family picnic will return.

The Fourth of June is this Saturday – the 16th of June.

The event is the creation of an upcoming Lerici native who has already carved a path across the furthest reaches of the classical-music world. Conductor Gianluca Marciano has won critical acclaim at posts in Georgia, Armenia and Serbia. This footprint has given him unique access to the conservatories of Eastern Europe and Central Asia – regions which now figure heavily in the festival’s simply-named Orchestra Excellence. Although its new-generation members are drawn from twenty countries – including Venezuela and the UK – at the ensemble’s heart is the militant artistic seriousness of the former Soviet Union. Marshalling these forces is the festival’s co-director Maxim Novikov, the highly-rated Russian viola player who has performed as a soloist with the Mariinsky Orchestra.

The result is a youth orchestra of exceptional quality. Deployed with minimal rehearsal time to non-professional facilities, it produces commanding performances of big pieces matching the festival’s Romantic theme. The principal venue is the barrel-vaulted baroque church of San Francesco – a building as beautiful as it is acoustically unforgiving. Yet throughout the loud and difficult topography of Berlioz’s Harold in Italy, the orchestra sections found a balance which would elude many established ensembles. In a second half of Verdi arias and duets, they were successfully tested against the heavy artillery of a pair of mature professional singers. Playing in the open air presents worse challenges – but a beachfront performance of Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherezade held the attention of a local and international audience with its warm tone and theatricality.

Marciano clearly delights in challenging his players. With a day’s notice, he replaced a mild-mannered Mozart concerto with Beethoven’s huge and predatory Seventh Symphony. This would be a fast serve for many professional festival orchestras not used to playing together. Ever keen for punishment, the Orchestra Excellence picked up their instruments and hit the ball back over the net – and hard.

Their dedication is well-rewarded. Everyone appearing in the festival’s fifteen concerts is given a full biography and picture in the sea-blue programme. When not shunting players between hotel rooms or looking after his sponsors, Marciano is quietly welcoming musical power-brokers into the ensemble’s presence. When the trustee of a London orchestra drops into a rehearsal, he is casually identified to the players. The up-tick in their playing is audible. Contrasting their appetite with the more comfortable, tenured world of Western orchestras, Novikov says that musicians needs to be hungry (they also need to be watered: with the camaraderie of an officer looking after his troops, he liberates open bottles from the gala functions to take back to the hotel).

Marciano’s local roots lend the festival a touching inclusiveness – aided by a programme of free or donation-only events. During rehearsals, the orchestra is fed from the presbytery of the Church of San Francesco. Inquiring as to the identity of some VIP guests, the priest quietly concludes: ‘Ah, they’re from Lerici. I’d better say hello.’ At the back of the church, a dachshund quietly ponders the standing ovations.

Early on Friday morning – before the village is awake – a viola trio forms up in Lerici’s old Jewish quarter to play new works by Israeli composer Eliezer Elper. No audience is needed: the performance is a memorial to those deported when the region was under German occupation. They included Gianluca Marciano’s own grandfather, who became one of the few escapees from Buchenwald then remained in hiding for months after the end of the war. In contemporary terms, the festival has no political mandate – existing purely for art’s sake. Yet the mixing of young musical talent can only be welcome as political fault-lines reopen between East and West.

The event’s powerful musical resources mean it need only lean lightly on Lerici’s literary heritage. The organisers secured a world-first by opening Shelley’s villa for a public recital by Maxim Novikov and Maria Mikhaylovskaya, one of Russia’s best new-generation harpists. They promise to up the stakes next year by placing the orchestra on a pontoon moored in the sea and starting to release material on their own label. Once a graveyard of poets, the bay of Lerici has been reborn as a gymnasium of musical talent whose DNA will be found in global orchestras for years to come.

A central conclusion is that anti-Semitism should be considered as a multiplicitous – or ‘elastic’ – phenomenon; both in terms of how these sentiments are held and how they are perceived by Jewish people. The survey builds a three-dimensional picture of attitudes by tirelessly cross-referencing responses from individuals, and explicitly rejects the notion that a handful of anti-Semitic responses make an anti-Semite. As such, it draws a distinction between the 5% minority of Britons considered actively anti-Semitic and the much larger 30% pool who hold one or more anti-Semitic view. Yet the presence of this background – or ‘diffused’ – anti-Semitism in turn underpins a tendency for Jewish people to be oversensitive to isolated examples. Together with the presence of cultural differences – for example Jewish people associating their identity more closely with Israel than non-Jewish people realise – the report reaches a two-fold conclusion: that much anti-Semitism is unintentional, and that that which exists tends to be over-perceived by Jewish people. Happily, this holds true to much everyday experience in Britain. When an Israeli activist recently draped himself in the national flag and walked through inner-city London, he drew only occasional stares.

Even so, the CST’s own data recorded a 30% increase in anti-Semitic incidents during half of 2017 – taking the total to the highest ever since records began in 1984. Against this background, the report’s methodology feels extremely forgiving. Its authors have calmly rejected the growing conventional arsenal for offence-taking – instead raising the bar for discrimination just as other groups are lowering it. In particular, their rejection of ‘victim-identified’ discrimination – instead suggesting that potential victims are least well-equipped to identify genuine hate – swims against a growing orthodoxy in the British legal system. In an era when a stray Tweet can lead to a visit from the police – and piles of unsubstantiated online reports have been used to generate sweeping moral panics – the forensic attitude is remarkable.

What lies behind it? It is tempting to cite the long tradition of Jewish rationalism, as well as the historical resonances of an ‘elastic’ reading of anti-Semitism. (“He may be Prime Minister,” said one aristocratic hostess about Britain’s Jewish-born leader Benjamin Disraeli. “But do we have to have him in the house?” A better example of elasticity couldn’t be found). More immediately, there is the need for the sponsoring organisations to deploy resources without ideological blinkers and with maximum effect. Equally there is the practical question of who would benefit from raising the cry of anti-Semitism. It is by no means clear if over a decade of intense discussion of Islamophobia has made Muslims – or indeed anyone – safer. The lesson of the recent cycle of political radicalisation in the US is that if you tilt at a windmill, it is liable to tilt back.

And yet, as it feels out its response to anti-Semitism, there is a paradox at work which is unique to the Jewish community: for it to respond in an organised way risks undermining the very assimilation on which its security has rested. Where other risk groups typically self-identify and self-organise in response to threat – very vocally, in some cases – Jewish communities do the reverse. A second anti-Semitism survey this summer – conducted among Jewish people themselves – revealed that over a third of respondents had stopped self-identifying in public. At the root of this response is the profound fear of de-assimilation. To understand what the threat of de-assimilation means, it is necessary to understand the sheer speed which it struck during the Twentieth Century.

As late as the First World War, the notion of a German-directed holocaust against the Jewish people would have seemed like an evil fantasy. Second only to Britain, German-speaking lands had provided rich grounds for Jewish settlers to pursue their doctrine of providing social utility as a means of assimilation. The rising tide of Nineteenth Century Liberalism carried these settlers with it, meaning entry into the professions and arts was high. Theodore Herzl made Austria-Hungary the base for his project for a Jewish state. In his optimism, the immaculately-dressed Zionist actually ran to work each morning. Such threat as remained was outside Europe in Tsarist Russia, where Jewish people were still confined to the Pale of Settlement around modern Ukraine and Poland. This second-class life – as represented in the Fiddler on the Roof – was a far cry from the bourgeois opportunities of Vienna or Berlin.

The winds changed too quickly for many to respond and save their own lives. A mere 14 years elapsed between the drafting of the the Weimar Republic’s constitution by its – Jewish – Interior Minister to the banning of Jewish Germans from the civil service. That is less time than has passed since 9/11. Disbelief – denial, in fact – is a constant theme of Jewish popular response to Nazi Germany. Worse was the very success of assimilation being turned against these communities. The characterisation of ‘rich Jews’ was itself dependent on a success in the professions which would have been impossible in isolation from society. And yet the caricature of super-sophisticated, fur-coat-wearing industrialists coexisted with propaganda cartoons of rats. The mugging by reality was too brutal to be comprehended – not only before the war but after. Survivors found themselves shunned. “It couldn’t happen” mutated into “it couldn’t have happened”.

But it did.

De-assimilation anxiety has pulled hard on the western Jewish consciousness ever since – and provides a key to understanding modern popular culture. The hit Meet-The-Parents series of movie comedies turns on precisely this point: the nightmare experienced by a modern secular Jew attempting to marry into the ultimate WASP family. The actor Sacha Baron Cohen hides behind multiple characters partly to draw out latent anti-Semitism. Only once in his career has the mask slipped on camera: when in the guise of a Kazakh film producer, he got a Midwestern American audience singing along to ‘Throw the Jew Down the Well’. The Channel 4 Television series Jewish Mum of the Year sparked a huge wave of de-assimilation anxiety when it was aired in 2012. By casting a spotlight on the dualism which seeks to preserve Jewish cultural customs while also contributing fully to society, it committed an unforgivable sin.

The fear of de-assimilation goes beyond anti-Semitism and even pushes away the opposite sentiment of philo-Semitism. The public profession of wider pro-Jewish feelings should – like self-organisation – be a natural antidote to anti-Semitism. Indeed, the success of every other ‘identity politics’ movement in the West has rested on leveraging the support of outsiders: be they straight, white, or non-transgender. But when it comes expressing solidarity with Jewish people – especially in social situations – the gift is often returned unopened. From a de-assimilation perspective, a vocal philo-Semite can be – tragically – the next worse thing to an anti-Semite. Such discomfort was seen in the response to Julie Burchill’s strident 2014 memoir of Judeophilia Unchosen.

Anti-Semitism therefore presents a double fear – both awakening the spectre of an existential threat and presenting an impossible dilemma on how to respond. The potential for a vicious cycle of de-assimilation is already sickeningly present in France. This week the head of a school in Marseilles made the stark admission that he – and other headmasters – could not guarantee the safety of Jewish children in state schools. Instead, he refers them to Jewish schools – making them even easier to identify. The presence of unmarked, fortified Jewish schools in North London already sits uneasily on the same spectrum. It is with this future in mind that Jewish communities metabolise prejudice differently from other risk groups – absorbing it when possible, and eschewing victim status where others amplify it.

Yet, for all the analytical calm of this week’s report, some of its logical extensions are less comforting. Although it establishes a clear distinction between anti-Semitism and anti-Israelism – with the latter being far more developed – it acknowledges that, where most virulent, the two strains converge. Similarly it acknowledges that, while anti-Semitism exerts a much stronger hold on the far-Right than the far-Left of politics, the numerical superiority of the far-Left creates something of a demographic parity. It points out that the more advanced entryism of the far-Left into the ‘mainstream’ of politics carries anti-Semitism closer to the centre than the more developed anti-Semitism of the far Right, which remains more isolated. And it points to 4x to 6x higher level of anti-Semitism among certain other religious sub-groups – with this becoming more pronounced with greater religious observance.

For the reasons outlined above, the traditional ‘keep calm and carry on’ is good tactical advice for Jewish communities. But below the sanguine exterior, unease is growing. Whether it is also the right long-term strategy is another question. If anti-Semitism continues to grow in the UK, it may be time for Britain’s long-standing philo-Semitism to be more openly stated – and accepted.

As a result, disagreement today has come to be seen not as a constructive process but as an attack on the individual psyche. This drives a weird world-view where the cry-bully complex thrives.

Such brittleness was a central feature of the 2016 US Election campaign. Both sides appealed to voters’ egos – particularly their sense of victimhood – rather than their empathy. The domestic terror of Charlottesville, Dallas, and Washington DC, has since testified that such Freudian techniques do not belong in political campaigns. The tearful online appeal of one of the “Unite the Right” organisers indicates how far aggression is now co-dependent on self-pity. Reality came as a similar shock to the Antifa activist arrested while giving a press conference about a felony. The law had infringed on her reality: it had gaslighted her.

Into the space left by a shared, objective reality flood the projections of the individual. The conspiring and conspiracy-obsessed Hillary Clinton persuaded her supporters that negative stories about her were the result of a “vast, right-wing media conspiracy” – a brilliant, self-reinforcing tactic. The subtext was to make unreal whatever impinges on “your” reality. Since the election, Donald Trump has been proffered to voters as gaslighter-in-chief. Along with all such social-justice overstretch, the inflation of the term betrays its original beneficiaries: victims of actual domestic gaslighting.

Nowhere is reality-blocking more evident than in the public response to Islamist terror. This used to consist of adding a flag to your social-media profile (combining virtue-signalling with the publicising of terror without stepping out of a Western frame of reference). The recent terror attack in Barcelona saw the comfort blanket of unreality pulled even tighter. Twitter users responded by “hashtag flooding” the subject with cat pictures. Ostensibly this was to help the police: really it conformed to the de facto political ban on sharing terror images.

The flight from reality has touched down firmly on the shores of the UK. Young voters are gorging on the fantasies of Jeremy Corbyn, whose commitments – most recently on tuition fees and welfare – are unreal. He exhibits a calm moral superiority while remaining ambivalent towards violence carried out against others (most recently the starving, unarmed Venezuelan public). Like clicktivism and social-media sniping, it is the perfect placebo for a generation numbed by decades of comfortable relativism. It fills the space hollowed out by consumerism and pop culture, yet requires no action or sacrifice beyond a walk to the polling station. The acute moral hazard of discussing class action and class guilt – when precisely such thinking once cost millions of people their lives – is ignored. Personal morality – in the sexual sphere, for example – is shouted down as reactionary. Consumers’ professed environmentalism is similarly externalised, in this case onto governments and international treaties.

The triad of victimhood, unreality and fake morality is proving to be a deadly combination. Not just for Western societies – but for a developing world which once looked to the West for compassion and economic partnership. As the West sinks deeper into self-pity, this role is being eroded. The feminism of Hillary Clinton’s campaign took little interest in Middle-Eastern women because those women had no votes in the US election. The European trade partnerships which once lifted other continents out of poverty – a seminal study in 1902 shocked Britain by revealing that its biggest trading partner was South America, where it had few Imperial interests – are in danger of being sacrificed to EU and US protectionism.

This points to the great irony of the so-called globalised age: that the West – still a beacon of progress and development to millions around the world – is closing in on itself. Well-fed Antifa and Momentum protestors consider their own ideological traumas to be the West’s most pressing issue. For all the flag-waving of Corbynites and Democrats – Palestine! Tibet! Anywhere! – the real focus of their attention is at home.

The breaking of the Western psyche was once a means to an economic end. Since the failure of Marxist utopias everywhere – most recently Venezuela – it appears to have become an end in itself. As such, Jeremy Corbyn’s increased minority is his dream ticket – giving him more power to destroy but no responsibility to create. And here lies a clue to the real purpose of our cultivated flight to unreality: that to cut off the branch you’re sitting on, you mustn’t look down.

At the other end of the spectrum, our ‘Far Right’ is not same beast as America’s. Even the small minority of White Nationalists which congregated in Charlottesville is not present in the UK. Similarly we have not – and will not – seen the election of a Donald Trump. The absurd attempt to equate Brexit with a Trump-type turn in British politics has failed.

The narrative of America’s unreconstructed Neo-Fascists is crude but clear. That of Antifa is more subtle. At its heart is the equivalence between ‘psychological violence’ – namely the holding or articulating of offensive beliefs – with physical violence. From this flows the claim that psychological violence can be met with physical violence, and therefore that Antifa’s violence is actually defensive (not pre-emptive, note; as the threat of physical violence is not required to take action). Antifa also reserves the right to define psychological violence unilaterally.

The mainstream take comfort from the idea that only Neo-Nazis are at risk. But the accusation of psychological violence does not stop at Neo-Nazis. In the Antifa stronghold of Portland, followers threatened forcibly to remove from a civic parade any of the town’s Republican voters. The idea has further become embedded that the very idea of free speech – let alone its practice – is psychologically violent and therefore deserving of extra-legal force (the breaking up of Boston’s Free Speech rally was a case in point). That provides an extremely large target group of mainstream conservatives – some of whom are surely at risk of counter-radicalisation if they are attacked. Similarly, an anti-Marxism march is now to be targetted.

Under such circumstances, the concept of victim-identified psychological violence should be handled with extreme care. Unfortunately, it is not. The announcement of the Crown Prosecution Service’s sentencing crackdown for online hate-crime leant heavily on the idea. Although the ostensible justification for criminalising hate-speech is that it leads to physical crime, the Director of Public Prosecution’s launch article in the Guardian finished on limiting ‘division and intolerance’ and media hostility. In other words, psychological violence – which she promises to meet with physical coercion in the form of arrest. Meanwhile the CPS website defines a hate incident as any ‘which the victim – or anyone else – thinks is based on someone’s prejudice towards them’. Here we find precisely the unilateral, self-rooted definition of psychological violence employed by Antifa.

The CPS hopes to expand its own remit with this move. But the lesson of the US is that activists are ever more willing to short-circuit the state and respond directly to their personalised definitions of psychological violence. The CPS is therefore treading a fine line by giving these concepts greater legitimacy. If Britain’s anarchist fringe perceives ever more psychological violence present in society, it too will feel more justified in bypassing the state by means of ‘defensive’ violence of its own. This will only drive a re-radicalistion of Far Right, in turn growing the base of a British Antifa. At best, you have to give it to the CPS for keeping itself in a job. At worst, it may be undermining the very order it is supposed to keep.

What did these three stories have in common? All saw the stress-testing of prevailing theory against awkward data. Only in Charlottesville did the news event initially align with the theory (that the West is under greater threat from white-nationalist terror than its anarchist and Islamist counterparts). But even here the factual headwinds were strong: Antifa condoning of illegality had already lead to a pandemic of armed rioting and two intended gun massacres. There was evidence of combatants having cherry-picked their side (“I wasn’t sure if I was racist or anti-racist,” mused one Antifa). Yet the cry of “no equivalence” was strong enough for CNN to remove the word “violent” from the headline of an article in which Antifa inteviewees openly embraced violence. A popular meme which circulated after Charlottesville tallied up more fatalities at the hands of white-nationalists than Islamists: only a closer look revealed the sample was dated from the day after 9/11.

As in the cases of Google and Sarah Champion, the thesis on Charlottesville was being sheltered from antitheses, preventing the development of meaningful hypotheses to address existential issues. A society which fought for centuries to descend from the unbridgeable heights of dogma appears to be ascending them once again: as a result, the political dialectic is breaking down and being replaced by violence. How has this happened?

The mainstream Right sometimes answers with vague grumblings about Cultural Marxism – a bogeyman which is easily ridiculed by the nu-Left as conspiracy theory. Yet return to the horse’s mouth and the vagueness soon evaporates. KGB defector Yuri Bezmenov described the goal of his work as follows: “Despite the abundance of information, no-one is able to come to sensible conclusions in the interest of defending themselves, their family, their communities… You cannot change their mind, even if you expose them to authentic information.”

Sound familiar? It should, because close on a century of intellectual history provides the waymarkers to understanding today’s ideological currents. The need to alter cultural perceptions was first identified by the Hungarian George Lukacs in the early 1920s. He blamed the cultures which had a symbiotic relationship with democracy for the failure of Western proletariats to revolt during World War I. To address this problem, he declared “Western Society is the enemy”. His associates in Frankfurt developed Critical Theory; a philosophical approach which sought to unpack all the bases of society, and Western society in particular. As such, it was willfully asymettrical. One of its key exponents, Herbert Marcuse, wrote in a seminal 1965 essay that tolerance should be a “partisan goal” – extended only to “policies, attitudes, and opinions which are outlawed or suppressed” and withdrawn from “prevailing policies, attitudes, opinions”.

If Marcuse’s “repressive tolerance” was the intellectual warhead, then his contemporary Saul Alinsky provided the delivery mechanism. Alinsky’s seminal 1971 handbook Rules for Radicals instructed social revolutionaries in the mechanics of isolating civil institutions.

Lukacs’ culture-wide agenda. Marcuse’s asymmettrical tolerance. Alinsky’s cultivated hysteria. All sought both to influence and circument political process.

And so back to the present day.

First, the Google Memo. The broad-based reassessment of both sexuality and gender is not as recent as it seems. Lukacs himself perceived that society was built on family units – so to unmake society, you had to unmake sex. He did so by extending Freud’s theory of ‘polymorphic perversity’ – the stage of a young child’s life where it experiences sexual stimulation from many types of contact – into adulthood. The current trend of ‘polyamorous’ relationships and experimental sexuality is the direct heir to this thinking (unwittingly striking at the hard-won philosophical basis of the Gay Rights movements: that sexuality is not a choice). Yet by allowing itself to be be colonised by a wider political agenda, the LGBT movement – like large swathes of feminism – can now never be fulfilled. Because as long as gender remains, the cultural problem remains; and where the cultural problem remains, the political problem remains. Hence the overt response by Google to the statistical work of James Damore.

Second, the road to Charlottesville. When Alinsky wrote his Rules for Radicals, he didn’t forsee that the same activist tools could be turned against his side. Mainstream “Alt-Righter” Milo Yiannopoulos terms his activity Cultural Libertarianism precisely because it appropriates Alinsky’s tools: hyperbole, mockery, and pushing the boundaries of acceptability. Hence the broader Alt Right includes “Men’s Right Activists”, “Trump Blondes” and continual meme warfare designed to provoke. This boundary-pushing environment proved fertile ground for genuine white nationalists, who enticed Middle Americans to break out of the silo of “white privilege” by embracing white supremacy (a label to which many Trump voters had already been acclimatised by their opponents). To some, flirting with Nazi imagery probably started as the “ultimate troll”. But it is a line which cannot be re-crossed, and now Antifa has the enemy which its name has long demanded.

Third, the hounding of Sarah Champion MP for recounting her first-hand knowledge of the cultural aspect of the UK’s horrific grooming-to-gang-rape phenomenon. Only the previous weekend, The Sunday Times had studiously produced the party line: that to couch these crimes in cultural terms distracts from them. But failing to acknowledge the cultural context is precisely what allowed the activity to continue so widely in the first place. Here we find the inheritance of perhaps the most insidious waymarker: the “repressive tolerance” of Herbert Marcuse. Because what was extended to the grooming gangs – the ultimate in “outlawed or suppressed” behaviour – other than the tolerance of silence? Meanwhile their accusers, belonging to the “prevailing” culture, were suppressed.

The grand irony is that Russia, which for so long actively seeded this thinking, has recently performed a brilliant volte-face to become the champion of the political Right and of traditional social values. Only now that the Left is on the receiving end of Russia’s cultural machinations does it take umbrage at the interference. But it should be no surprise to progressives that Russia can manipulate our culture with such ease: with their agreement, it has been doing so for decades.