Janelle’s Reviews > Selected Nonfiction, 1962-2007 > Status Update

Football crowds rocking stadiums and bellowing anthems are taking part in political rallies without realising it, as would-be fascist leaders will have noted.

I’m sure Blair took us into Iraq because he was flattered to be summoned from the lower school and invited into the senior prefect’s study.

Portillo, on the other hand, has the TV-honed skills to become a real threat. He smiles to camera like a basking shark sliding through a sea of warm plankton.

Elections are now held as a public information service, like the VD and drink-driving campaigns of old, to maintain the necessary illusion that politics matters.

Aldous Huxley was uncannily prophetic, a more astute guide to the future than any other 20th-century novelist. Even his casual asides have a surprising relevance to our own times. During the first world war, after America’s entry, he warned: “I dread the inevitable acceleration of American world domination which will be the result of it all . . . Europe will no longer be Europe.”