America divides opinion, but we all have an opinion. For most of the world it is, in some sense, their second home even if they have never been there, so great is its impact on our lives. But is America in decline, finished even? Many respected intellectuals and most of the media elite seem to think so.

America divides opinion, but we all have an opinion. For most of the world it is, in some sense, their second home even if they have never been there, so great is its impact on our lives. But is America in decline, finished even? Many respected intellectuals and most of the media elite seem to think so.

WE all know that Albert Reynolds, Taoiseach from 1992 to 1994, hasn’t always enjoyed the kindest press. It’s not just The Sunday Times that has been harsh.

Drug use remains illegal in Portugal. People are still stopped by the police and have their drugs confiscated. But drug use there is seen as a health, not a judicial, issue. Crucially, anyone caught with less than what is determined to be a 10-day personal supply is not arrested and does not face jail

But antipathy to nuclear power has become a kind of secular religion, based almost entirely on superstition and bad science. It is the sine qua non of what Lenin once called ‘infantile leftism’. Nuclear power was opposed at least partly because it seemed to imply a commitment to a nuclear military industry and thus nuclear weapons

The most remarkable thing about Chappaquiddick is that Kennedy was 37 years old at the time. This was not some youthful shenanigans gone wrong. Everything about the story — the drinking, philandering, poor judgment and lies — were the man. It was entirely in character

Optimistic analysts hope the appalling suffering in Burma will inevitably lead to the collapse of the junta and its replacement by a government led by Aung San Suu Kyi. It’s a forlorn hope: the Burmese army is willing to kill civilians in large numbers. So long as the army stays united, nothing will change

Calvinism was important in that sense in forging the modern economy and contemporary society. By stressing God’s command to work, Calvinists encouraged the essential capitalist belief that secular success was also a religious imperative, and that idleness and dependency were sins

We kind of know instinctively, without having to test the proposition, that if you laid out a few rashers of bacon on a sunbed and switched on for an hour, they would probably come out crispy and golden. If you don’t know that, you’re probably too far gone in a sea of calories and computer games to care

On the other hand, you might ask what kind of “enlightened and cultured people”, to use Peres’s phrase, is it that needs a bulldozer to crack a nut; that feels the need to deploy hundreds of policemen to the task of evicting two Arab families from an Arab neighbourhood? That’s Israel for you