Culture

There is a fading misconception in Europe that every white person in South Africa lives the life of Reilly, albeit behind a barbed-wire perimeter fence. The fact is that, apart from all the hardworking white postmen and store clerks, genuine white trash abounds, booted out of one too many doors by bosses and wives and daughters’ boyfriends. They walk the streets, live in small townships and paint houses if they don’t drink the paint first. There are quite a lot of them, presumably more now than ever. Emigrating to Canada or Europe is not really an option for these lost white dogs of Africa. The high commissions wouldn’t let them in the door. I picked up such a hitchhiker once, about 40 years old, on the road to Cape Town.

Andrew Marr is a great adornment to his — our — trade. He is terribly clever and well-read, and I am sure he could have done something serious and useful with his life. But he decided early on that journalism was the thing for him. Despite his first-class degree in English at Cambridge, it quickly dawned on him that he wasn’t really qualified for any profession. ‘I was a scientifically illiterate innocent with the entrepreneurial instincts of a 13th-century peasant and the iron determination of a butterfly,’ he writes. ‘Journalism seemed the only option.’ But surely his instinct must also have told him that journalism was a field in which he would excel. He was gregarious, inquisitive, perceptive, energetic, and deft with his pen.

‘Every true writer becomes a writer because of a profound trauma experienced in youth or childhood,’ wrote Amos Oz in The Silence of Heaven, his study of the work of the Israeli Nobel-prize winner Shmuel Yosef Agnon. With reservations, he added, ‘We might venture to say that the flight of the narrator’s imagination is as high as the depth of his wound....’ All this might apply to Oz himself, his own profound trauma being the suicide of his mother, Fania, when he was 12. Perhaps, too, it is possible to say that the depth of that wound has made Oz one of the greatest novelists of our times.

When Silvio Berlusconi came to power for the second time in May 2001, in a landslide victory, Italy became unique among Western democracies: no other nation had at its head its richest citizen — the 35th richest man in the world — someone who also enjoyed a monopoly of the country’s private television broadcasting. More important, no other country had its prime minister on trial, accused of bribing judges, ruling over a coalition busy enacting special laws to protect himself and his friends. Drawing attention to these facts in the Economist not long afterwards, David Lane provoked fury in the Italian political and financial establishment, and talk among Italy’s EU partners, where his articles were widely read.

I have a faded photograph of Frances Osborne. I imagine the moment the picture was taken: perhaps she had just been told that this, her first book, would be published. She must have been happy and would have shared her happiness with her children, Luke and Liberty, who, I suppose, must have been happy, too. I can also picture Ms Osborne before she became an author, when she was a barrister, banker and a journalist. In each of these activities, she probably worked very hard, had been disappointed at times and happy at others. I like to think of her at her second home in Cheshire when this picture was taken. It must be a lovely place.