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Do you suppose that Kamala Harris is a student of Jane Austen? The contingency, as Jeeves was wont to observe, is remote. Yet there is at least one passage from Pride and Prejudice that I’d wager Harris would appreciate. Towards the end of the novel, after she has accepted Mr Darcy’s proposal of marriage, Elizabeth confides the news to her sister Jane. Knowing how cordially Elizabeth had disliked Mr Darcy in days past, Jane is appalled. ‘Oh, Lizzy! it cannot be. I know how much you dislike him.’ ‘You know nothing of the matter. That is all to be forgot. Perhaps I did not always love him so well as I do now. But in such cases as these, a good memory is unpardonable. This is the last time I shall ever remember it myself.

Joe Manchin could be the most powerful man in the Senate. The senior senator from West Virginia is the last Democrat hanging onto federal office in a state that twice voted for Donald Trump by 40 points, but he doesn’t always toe the party line. Of the ‘defund the police’ movement that gained traction on the Left over the summer, Manchin says, ‘Defund my butt.’ If you were unsure about federal funding of his posterior, he went on to elaborate: ‘We do not have some crazy socialist agenda, and we do not believe in defunding the police.’ Manchin described a Democratic proposal to continue trying to impeach Trump after the 45th president leaves office as ‘so ill-advised’. Yet he did not vote to acquit Trump in his Senate trial last year.

The end of the Cold War was as great a shock to US politics as it was to the Soviet Union’s. The Soviet regime didn’t survive, of course, and late 2021 will mark 30 years since the USSR dissolved. Mikhail Gorbachev had tried to save the Soviet system through reform. The Communist hardliners who briefly deposed him in the summer of 1991 tried to save it by rolling back reform. Neither sufficed — the regime, and the party and ideology at its heart, had lost their legitimacy irrevocably. The first US presidential election after the collapse of the USSR almost rendered the same verdict on the regime in Washington. The 1992 election saw a populist challenge to President George H.W. Bush from within his own party.

Like most Greek stories, the tale of Pandora’s box is fraught with ambiguity. Most of us, when we first encounter the story, learn that it is a fable about the dangers of curiosity, not unlike the story ‘of man’s first disobedience, and the Fruit/ of that Forbidden Tree’. As Eve sneaked the apple, so Pandora took the lid off a box that she was forbidden to peek inside. Bang! Death, illness, famine and all the other miseries of the world escaped to blight man’s life, leaving behind only hope as a sort of consolation prize. But is hope a consolation? Or is it a subtler, more insinuating evil?

In a speech to the Federalist Society in November, Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito reiterated his concern that ‘in certain quarters, religious liberty is fast becoming a disfavored right’. Small wonder that the subject was on his mind. A week earlier, the Court had heard oral arguments in the latest religious-liberty case, Fulton v. City of Philadelphia. In it, Catholic Social Services — one of some 30 agencies used by the city to place foster children in private homes — claimed religious exemption for its policy of placing kids in traditional mom-and-dad family settings. So far, one might think, so unremarkable: a Catholic agency conforms its good works to Catholic principles. But what about nontraditional couples — like those of the same sex?

The causes of violent rioting and looting are complicated and often include real, unaddressed grievances. One thing is clear, though: looting has few winners and many losers. The losers in the long run are often those breaking the windows and making off with the bling. Many of us are trying to get a handle on the unrest we’ve witnessed in 2020. History doesn’t repeat itself, and, pace Mark Twain, it may not even rhyme, but sometimes a little context helps, if only to suggest possibilities. The considerable scholarly literature on the ‘race riots’ of the 1960s is mostly sympathetic to the rioters. It excuses or at least countenances violence because its authors share what they perceive to be the rioters’ goals: racial equality, social justice and the like.