Hugh was talking about Dante the other day. This is from The Telegraph.

The researchers at the University of Bologna have pieced together the "true face" of Florence's favourite son and discovered that it was very different from the portraits of him by the artists Botticelli, Raphael and Giotto. . . the new three-dimensional recreation of Dante's face, revealed yesterday, has a wide forehead and a normal, if robust, chin. The features are softer, and the poet's large nose seems slightly more in proportion.

Prof Giorgio Gruppioni, an anthropologist . .  led the research,  The reconstruction took him and two colleagues around a year to complete, he added. Prof Francesco Mallegni, of the University of Pisa, also worked on the project.

The team worked from measurements and photographs of Dante's bones collected by Fabio Frassetto, a professor at Bologna University in the 1920s who was given permission to open up his grave in Ravenna.

Although Prof Frassetto was not allowed to make a cast of the skull, he did create a replica from his measurements. "Frassetto made hundreds of measurements, and the skull is accurate to the millimetre," said Prof Gruppioni.  Working from that replica, the team modelled Dante's jaw using a three-dimensional computer imaging tool. Then, with the help of a forensic scientist and a sculptor, they recreated the face and calculated the ratio of fat to muscle in the poet's features.

"This is the closest we will ever get to seeing the real Dante's face," said Prof Gruppioni.  Although the most famous portraits of Dante are exaggerated, a set of frescoes, discovered in Florence three years ago, show a closer likeness of the poet. They were painted just 50 years or so after the poet's death and have now been opened up to the public in the Palazzo dell'Arte dei Giudici e Notai.

The NHS should provide more faith-based care for Muslims, an expert says. According to the BBC.

Muslims are about twice as likely to report poor health and disability than the general population, says Edinburgh University's Professor Aziz Sheikh.

Writing in the British Medical Journal, he called for male circumcision on the NHS and more details over alcohol derived drugs.

Professor Sheikh said a better picture of the health profile and experiences of British Muslims was needed to help them access services.

"Male infant circumcision should be available throughout the NHS. Although a handful of NHS trusts provide it, most parents are forced into the poorly regulated private sector," Professor Sheikh said.

He also said hospitals needed to accommodate Muslims in other ways.

"Many Muslims, to maintain modesty, prefer to see a same sex clinician. Such choice is typically unavailable despite the higher number of women doctors in the NHS. Another important service is to enable Muslims to avoid porcine and alcohol derived drugs."

Professor Sheikh, from Edinburgh University's division of community health services, added Muslims should be given better access to prayer facilities and advice over how they should modify their treatment for chronic conditions during Ramadan.

But Manchester University health expert Professor Aneez Esmail said it was not possible to meet everyone's needs. Professor Aneez Esmail, from Manchester University's school of primary care, said: "While it is reasonable we try to plan and configure our services to take account of needs that may have their roots in particular beliefs... we cannot meet everyone's demands for special services based on their religious identity. It would not be practical." Quite right.

And he added that some faith groups might support practices which may be morally and ethically unacceptable to the majority - for example female circumcision and the refusal to accept blood transfusions in life saving situations. “Unacceptable” is a bloody understatement if ever I saw one.

Professor Esmail said going down the path of providing special services for defined groups risks stigmatisation and stereotyping.

This suggestion is a diabolical liberty. The NHS is in crisis for numerous reasons. Muslim refusal to use antiseptic hand gel designed to control the spread of infection is only one problem. Why should circumcision be available free to Muslims? Jews have always paid for their own son’s operations, and organised for it to be done properly. Treatments on the NHS that could be considered vital to health and comfort, but which are not life threatening, like varicose veins have been cut. Even for life saving treatment there are unacceptable delays in some areas.

This call is a nonsense and should be seen as such. It is Islam pushing that little bit further yet again for privileges over the majority that they see already as their right.

No!

"Moderate Islamists"-- quoting an American diplomat with Africa as his portfolio

Do a little backdating:

"Moderate Nazis..."

"Moderate members of the Comintern..."

Was it Mikoyan who was the "moderate" and Suslov the "hard-liner"? Or was it fat Georgi Malenkov? Or Bulganin? I can't remember. Hard-liners, and the "moderates." The way in which vivid Western, and especialy American, imaginations, conjure up these soap-opera rivals:

The "moderates."
The "hard-liners."

RAMALLAH – In a speech today commemorating the 42nd anniversary of the founding of his Fatah party, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas called on Palestinian factions to put an end to weeks of infighting and instead "raise rifles against the Israeli occupation." ...

He also used Quranic verses to claim Jews are corrupting the world...

The multi-million-dollar grant will be used to "assist the Palestinian Authority presidency in fulfilling PA commitments under the Road Map (peace plan) to dismantle the infrastructure of terrorism and establish law and order in the West Bank and Gaza," a U.S. government document said.

Force 17 members told WND the ammunition and 7,000 assault rifles they say were delivered the past few weeks reached Fatah security forces in the Gaza Strip and in Ramallah in the West Bank. It was unclear if the arms were part of the $86 million in U.S. aid.--from this news article

This was a call to murder. For Abbas quoted Quran 5:64, and in doing so, in quoting that one of many verses that whips up hatred of Muslims toward Jews, he was trying to show that he was just as true and fanatical a Believer as his rivals in Hamas, and that no one should misunderstand him: he is for the Slow Jihad rather than the Fast Jihad because he is a bit cleverer than the people in Hamas, and is willing to lie about his ultimate goal just a bit more convincingly.

But not a single report about Abbas's speech mentioned Quran 5:64. Why not?

If the newspapers, radio, television, had any sense at all, they would realize that only those who know about Islam can make sense of what is being thought, being alluded to, being expressly said, by Arabs and Muslims.

The most important thing about Abbas's speech is his quotation of Qur'an 5:64. This is the verse in which the Jews are accused by Allah of "spreading corruption throughout the land" and Allah does not love -- wishes to see destroyed -- those who "spread corruption through the land." It amounts in the minds of devout Muslims to a complete denunication of the Jews; it is, along with so many other Qur'anic verses and stories from Hadith, that collective stream of hate that should put one in mind, for in effect if not in source it is no different, from the most dangerous antisemitic literature to come out of Europe.

And yet -- not a word by the State Department denouncing Abbas. Not a word from anyone else in the government, or from the U.N. Or from any Jewish group. Why? Because, apparently, if the Qur'an is quoted, the Qur'an must not be criticized. Indeed, the passage quoted must not even be mentioned. It's beyond criticism. It's "religion."

Here it is in the translation of A. J. Arberry:

"The Jews have said, 'God's hand is fettered.' Fettered are their hands, and they are cursed for what they have said. Nay, but His hands are outspread; He expends how He will. And what has been sent down to thee from thy Lord will surely increase many of them in insolence and unbelief; and We have cast between them enmity and hatred, till the Day of Resurrection. As often as they light a fire for war, God will extinguish it. They hasten about the earth, to do corruption there; and God loves not the workers of corruption."

My wife attended a tax seminar for CPAs yesterday, returning with the news that we will see a tax refund this year on the three percent federal excise tax levied on long-distance phone calls.  That would be the famous Spanish American War tax, terminated last year, a mere 108 years after the end of that brief, glorious conflict. 

Not to give the IRS any ideas, but in a moment of lunacy I imagined what it must be like for a distraught tax official desparate to come up with a replacement tax. Eureka, the idea comes to him:  the 2007 Pre-Emptive Technology Tax Act, which would enact a tax in anticipation of communications techné as yet uninvented.  Washington, here I come! 

What took them so long? Carter's attitudes have been on display for nearly thirty years. His palpable distaste for Begin, his utter lack of sympathy for the Israelis and his constant manipulation of things to present them in a bad light, his remark about "I am sick and tired of hearing about the Holocaust" (a remark that has not been handed down literatim, but that is the essence of it) to or about Begin, his pushing Sadat to be even more demanding, and then after the Camp David Accords, not satisfied with having forced that disastrous agreement down Israel's throat, Carter offered some P.R. advice to a man he so much wanted to succeed, Yassir Arafat, and told him just how he, Carter, thought the "Palestinian" cause could best be presented to the American public (in the first place, by stressing that bit about the "Palestinian people" and downplaying the pan-Arab or pan-Islamic opposition, and always telling the Americans things quite different from what Arafat would tell an Arab audience. This part of Carter's career is mentioned in Douglas Brinkley's biography.

All those who continued, after all this, for decades to continue to work at some place named, with characteristic humility, "The Carter Center," and who now find themselves suddenly shocked by Carter's latest book and his latest cruel and sinister behavior, are not very good apparently at picking up on the classic signs of the antisemite. And that includes not only all the things listed above, but a great deal else.

Glad that those who resigned resigned, though they ought never to have allowed themselves to be fooled in the first place.

As for all those who didn't resign, well...

The next time they come calling for support of any kind, or for their own special projects, give them the cold shoulder. Those who think Carter is still respectable company have, or should have, another think coming. He has made himself beyond the pale. But for those who looked closely, he made himself that way long ago, while he was President.

Perhaps if Congress does not have the stomach or ability to stop the squandering of American resources in Iraq for a fool's errand of a policy, it can at least put a stop to the payment of Jizyah to the "Palestinians." That means blocking the $86 million the Administration wants to give the Slow Jihadists -- who are, if Abbas' language is to be taken into account, not all that "Slow" in any case -- so that they, who are already so well-armed, can become even stronger.

They have been pleading, just like assorted "Iraqis," for more, more, more weapons from the Americans, claiming that "of course" these will strengthen the forces of "moderation." Doesn't the AP, doesn't Reuters, always affix the Homeric epithet "moderate" before the name "Mahmoud Abbas"? And strengthening the forces of “moderation” is, of course, a Good Thing, since those forces will then be able to wrest control from the “extremists.” That means they will be able to wrest the contents of the "Palestinian" bank accounts and all that foreign aid or Jizyah that will start to flow, because the Slow Jihadists love high living and are far more corrupt than the Fast Jihadists. That is the essential difference between Fatah's True but Corrupt Believers and Hamas's Even Truer and Less Corrupt Believers.

Stop the goddam Jizyah. If you can't stop the half-trillion that has gone to prevent sectarian and ethnic strife in Iraq that we should welcome and even encourage, then for god's sake at least take a stand on the Jizyah -- the Jizyah to Pakistan, creator and supporter and now meretricious protector of the Taliban and of many other Islamic groups dangerous to India and to the Infidels everywhere. Stop the Jizyah to Egypt, Egypt the sinister kleptocracy, the world center of antisemitism and anti-Americanism. Stop the Jizyah to Jordan, whose "plucky little kinglet" (son of the "plucky little king") is, thanks to Noor and Rana and plummy-voiced Prince Hassan, such a perennial crowd-pleaser. But what a crock, what a thin veneer, what a facade of rationality on a country quivering with anti-American and anti-Infidel hate. And stop, above all stop the Jizyah to that favorite cause of Western leaders wishing to avoid the matter of Islam, wishing to postpone the day of reckoning, wishing not to think about the arms of NATO or the lands of NATO falling into the wrong hands and becoming controlled by the Camp of Islam. And so, in their failure and ignorance and wish to avoid confronting reality, they always rush to give toys and good things to eat to the "Palestinians" and to reinforce, in their own minds, the dreamy belief that "if only" Israel and the "Palestinians" can come to an agreement, everything will simmer down. Oh, sure they can come to an agreement -- an agreement that will be broken, and must be broken, on the model of Muhammad's Treaty with the Meccans at Hudaibiyyah, just as soon as the Arab Muslims feel strong enough to go in for the kill.) They can come to an agreement, and then this little blip during which "extremists" seemed to have found an audience will end, and things will continue as before.

And as for the islamization of Western Europe through Da'wa and demographic conquest -- fugeddaboutit.

This is the level of thought that prevails in the chanceries of the West. The Americans are hardly the worst. But if the Bush Administration persists in this and other follies, it must be stopped by the sane and well-informed members of Congress, Republican and Democratic.

One waits for Tom Tancredo and others to declare their opposition, and to put that opposition in the terms used here: Stop the Jizyah. And explain why American aid to Muslim peoples and polities has become a kind of Jizyah, and why it must end. It must end so that the Americans and other Westerners break the habit of submission, of feeling that somehow they owe this to the "Palestinians," or to Egypt, or to Pakistan, or to Jordan. And it must end in order to break or disabuse the recipients from their confidence that they have this Jizyah coming to them, and the Western Infidels would not dare to permanently cut them off.

And finally, the Jizyah paid by Western governments should end so that the poorer Arabs and Muslims are forced to demand money from the rich Arabs, who are drowning in unearned wealth, so that they, those Saudis, those denizens of Kuwait and the U.A.E. and Qatar, with their tiny populations and hundreds of billions of dollars, will have to show or explain why they are not showing that famous solidarity and loyalty to fellow members of the world-wide Umma al-islamiyya. And since they will never provide what the "Palestinians" consider their due, or if it is provided the "Palestinians" will come back for more, all kinds of unhappiness and resentments will develop. For “Palestinians” do not have the habit of work, but only of warfare, and besides, Gaza and the West Bank are essentially unviable economically. The people there, though no one will say it aloud, can only continue to exist on a permanent dole. When they come back for more this will begin to grate on those Saudis, those Qataris, those Kuwaitis, and all the others.

And that is a Good Thing. Because along with the Sectarian and Ethnic Fissures on display in Iraq, the third great fissure within the Camp of Islam is Economic, between the fabulously rich oil states and peoples, and those without the manna of oil and gas. The economies of the latter states are as wretched as would be those of the Muslim oil states if those states did not possess that oil, that gas, those trillions in unearned and unmerited oil wealth.

BERLIN (Reuters) - Germany's interior minister said on Thursday that parts of the Islamic world had yet to embrace the values of the Enlightenment, and the European Union should help integrate Muslims by promoting the training of imams. --from this news item

He has no idea. Nor do the others. How do they propose to change the Qur'an, the immutable Word of God? How do they think the Hadith can be changed, so that the "authentic" Hadith become inauthentic, and vice-versa? What new Bukhari or Muslim, his hour come round at last, will slouch (I always did have trouble with that verb as Yeats uses it -- don't you?) into, not toward Bethlehem, but toward Berlin, Paris, Rome, Madrid, London (take your pick, followers and adorers of Tariq Ramadan) to be born?

And just how are Europeans going to change the Life of Muhammad, so that it is full of sweetness and light, and not full of aggression, violence, and endless attacks on innocent non-Muslims, whose only crime was to refuse to become Muslims?

How would this be done? How are mere Infidels going to tamper or change the texts of Islam? The only way to help Muslims accept the Enlightenment is by causing some of them to question, and question to the point of abandoning, Islam.

Germany was the country which first recognized, with unseemly haste, some of the states that first left Yugoslavia, without any consideration of what this might mean for Muslims and non-Muslims in the Balkans. It was a country whose press took the side of the Muslims against the Serbs, though one might have thought that, given the history of German and Nazi involvement in that area --at Kozara, for example, where Austrian Kurt Waldheim was decorated for his war crimes -- that the Germans would have taken care to find out a bit more about Izetbegovic, and his plans, that so terrified so many intelligent Serbs, and led to their disastrous support for someone like Milosevich. But there was none of that.

Similarly, one would have thought that Angela Merkel would have had the decency to hold her tongue about some idiotic "two-state solution," demonstrating a diffidence about putting pressure on Israel that should be demonstrated, by German governments, not for a decade or two but for all time -- and indeed, it should be one of the central missions of the Germans to work to ensure the permanent security of Israel, and an Israel not further reduced, but at a minimum possessing what is currently controlled by Israel today -- including the Judean heights and the aquifers of the West Bank, and of course control of the invasion route from the East. That is the least that can be done, and that Germany should require of itself.

As for the abandonment of Serbia, by Germany, and the blithe notion that "the majority" should decide when that "majority" is Muslim, and became a majority only by murdering and terrifying the Serbs into leaving -- what nonsense. There is a civilizational war. Serbia is on our side. Muslims are on the other side.

Those Muslims who are not real Muslims, but Muslims-for-identification-purposes Muslims, live happily in Serbia. Where does the director Emir Kusturica live? And why do you think that is?

Violence, terrorism and the Islamists' growing influence pose a threat to Christianity in the Middle East. In some countries, members of an unpopular Christian minority are already fighting for their survival -- or fleeing for their lives. --from this article in Der Spiegel

And a Jewish exodus that took place in 1948, because of the pogroms everywhere, in Libya and in Yemen, in Morocco and in Iraq, sometimes little and sometimes big.

And a Hindu exodus from Pakistan and Bangladesh, and from Kashmir, all the result of steady Muslim pressure, while in India itself Muslims continue to enlarge their absolute numbers, and their percentage of the population.

No Greeks, Jews, Armenians, Italians left in Egypt -- booted out in the 1950s by Nasser no matter how many centuries their families had lived in Egypt (some had been there since long before the Arabs arrived, bearing Islam), their property seized without compensation. And so the worldly Cairo and Alexandria that some Egyptians like to wax nostalgic over, and hope that somehow can come again, will never come again, because what non-Muslim in his right mind would now choose to live, forever, in a Muslim country, including "soft" Egypt?

And Constantinople in 1914 was 50% non-Muslim, and is now 1% non-Muslim. And the murders of more than a million Armenians, and the murder or hundreds of thousands, and expulsion of millions, of Greeks, have caused the non-Muslim population of Turkey itself to drop from 20% to less than 1/2 of 1%.

And all of this took place in less than a century, and in the "full light of history." And yet no one appears to have noticed how, everywhere that Muslims rule, now that they have regained their sense of power, they have managed to exert steady pressure to force non-Muslims out, everywhere that Islam rules.

Shouldn't this be taken in? Shouldn't some conclusions be drawn from the overwhelming evidence?

From a reader:

Full point Mr. Hugh. And just one more thing about director Emir Kusturica. In 2005 he dumped islam and took baptism in Serbian Orthodox Church giving a most vivid example what muslims should do if they want to became enlightened. He accepted a new name Nemanja (Nemanya) which btw was the name of the first Serbian ruler responsible for the baptism of the Serbs. Even the day he choose and the place is significant. Later, provoked by some malicious comments he said: "My father was an atheist and he always described himself as a Serb. OK, maybe we were Muslim for 250 years, but we were Orthodox before that and deep down we were always Serbs, religion cannot change that. We only became Muslims to survive the Turks." The last sentence explains a lot of things

John Derbyshire says of Dr Johnson:

One index of his greatness is that the French detest him.  (He wasn't crazy about them, either.)  We French, they sniff, have REAL intellectuals.  The English have—-who?  Doctor Johnson?  Ha ha ha ha!  As Dalrymple shows by a deft comparison with Voltaire, Johnson's was far the greater mind.

French intellectuals during this period may have preferred to spend their time watching Jean-Philippe Rameau’s opera-ballet Les Indes Galantes. Even by French standards this is silly, although I like the music. Click on the picture for some Friday afternoon fun (H/t Harry’s Place).

KUALA LUMPUR (AFP) - Malaysia's status as a moderate Muslim country is being put to the test in a milestone court decision that may allow Muslims to renounce their faith, a move considered one of Islam's greatest sins.--from this news item

It is difficult to believe that the Malaysian Court will allow freedom of conscience. And if, theoretically, such a right were to be acknowledged, the social pressure, and threats, on would-be apostates would continue. Look at how difficult, after 80 years of Kemalism, it is to leave Islam and convert to another religion. Meet with those who have done so, in Istanbul, as they whisper to you, and ask you to keep your own voice down, and not to draw attention to the fact that they are speaking to you about their new faith -- lest some "moderate" Turks take it into their head to do something.

Iraq, Taiwan, US soccer and more

Remember the scrap last year between rival Betjeman biographers? Ben MacIyntre laments the demise of the feud:

Writers have always conducted colourful feuds, and the García Máarquez-Vargas Llosa vendetta was one of the best. Once they were the closest friends. García Márquez was godfather to Vargas Llosa’s son. Then relations cooled, their political paths diverged, and three decades ago, for reasons that have never been fully explained by either side, the friendship came to an end with a fierce fist-fight in a Mexican cinema.

The art of the feud seems to be dying out. Writers once exhibited their sworn enemies with as much pride as any literary award. Politicians delighted in grudge and vengeance, and waded happily though rivers of bad blood. Artists openly slopped paint and vitriol over one another.

A genuine feud must be personal, prolonged, public, petty and so encrusted with ancient anger that only the participants (and possibly not even they) can remember how it started. The best feuds are nurtured over a lifetime, delivered in the form of steel barbs, sharpened with malice aforethought. Revenge should be served not only cold, but with the most elaborate garnish. Bevis Hillier recently served up such a dish to A.N. Wilson, his rival Betjeman biographer, by planting on him a fake letter from an invented mistress in which the first character of each sentence spelt an offensive message.

In case you've forgotten, the message was: "A. N. Wilson is a shit."

Most important feuds are sparked by something entirely unimportant. Vladimir Nabokov and the critic Edmund Wilson fell out after a quarter-century of close friendship over the precise translation of a single Russian phrase in Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin.

I wonder what it was.

When Nabokov, in that famous orange-covered issue of Encounter, published back in 1966 his "Reply to My Critics," in which the main critic to which he was replying was Edmund Wilson, he was not arguing over a "single phrase" but over many criticisms, all of them wrong, and all of them easily shown to be wrong, made by Wilson in his review of Nabokov's translation, with Commentary, of Pushkin's Eugene Onegin.

Ever since Nabokov had met Wilson in 1941, he had had to suffer through Wilson's misunderstanding of Russian expressions, and especially Wilson's misunderstanding of Russian prosody (partly a function of his not always knowing where the accent was to be placed on this or that Russian word, or how great the difference between stressed and unstressed syllables in Russian words as compared to English ones). In the Nabokov-Wilson Correspondence (ed. Simon Karlinsky) one can find Nabokov, time after time, trying to set Wilson straight on this or that point about Russian, and Wilson never quite realizing how silly it was for him to keep fighting someone who had, not only a native command of Russian, and a master of Russian prose and the best writer of the Russian emigration, but who, having arrived in the United States (where the first job he was offered was as a stock boy in a Fifth Avenue bookstore), wrote -- correctly -- to a friend that here he was in the position he was in, "knowing Russian better than anyone else" in the New World. Some may find that observation immodest. But it was true.

By the time Wilson reviewed Nabokov's translation, Nabokov had about had it with Wilson's pretensions when it came to the Russian language and Russian literature. He had been willing to overlook all kinds of things about Wilson, even the depiction of Lenin in "To the Finland Station." But by this time, Wilson's self-assured blundering was simply too much.

Nabokov begins his reply to Wilson by taking him, Wilson, to task for criticizing Nabokov's use of unusual words, including the archaic word "youthen," and other words Wilson thought were the kind of words one finds only in a dictionary, but is for some reason not permitted to actually use them.

And this is how Nabokov began his reply to that ludicrous objection:

"Mr. Wilson can hardly be unaware that once an author chooses to youthen or resurrect a word, it lives again, sobs again, stumbles all over the cemetery in doublet and trunk hose, and will keep annoying stodgy gravediggers, as long as that writer's book endures."

That sentence is worth an hour of close analysis, and those wishing to enroll in my summer seminar on literary analysis, to be held this summer in Europe, will be given that hour. (For details write to the management of NER). But it was not only "youthen" but other words, such as "mollitude," that Wilson objected to. And Wilson objected to the use of certain French words, such as "sapajou" as the translation of "obez'yana" instead of the more obvious "monkey" -- though Nabokov came triumphantly back with his reason for using "sapajou" (a word used by Pushkin in his Letters, commenting on someone as "un vieux sapajou").

And then there was Wilson's daring to correct Nabokov's use of English as when Nabokov translated a phrase by Pushkin as "swam in a gondola." Wilson didn't approve of someone "swimming" in a gondola, though Nabokov then came back with several examples of that precise use in Byron (who was of obvious relevance to E.O. and its creator), and in other English writers (I can't find the article so I can't produce the other examples here).

And no doubt, relying on memory, I have not covered all of the examples of Wilson's infuriating criticisms.

It was all of that, and all of the many misconceptions that underlay all that, which caused Nabokov to finally, once and for all, make his unanswerable reply to Wilson, and then, after that, their relations, which had already cooled somewhat, were never the same.

That is the story. Not the idea that they had a fight, which became a long-running feud, over the translation of a single word. That's the stuff of stuff and nonsense.

On the other hand, Edmund Wilson did have a fight with another writer, over something that many will regard as comical. The argument began over the question of Who Will Take Out the Garbage. The other writer was named Mary McCarthy. She was, at the time, the wife of Edmund Wilson. And at the time, not another  belle but the poubelle in question was located in Wellfleet, Massachusetts. The result of the argument was a divorce. In Mary McCarthy's future, after so much heaving passion, was a sedate American banker in Paris. In Edmund Wilson's future, Mumm was the word, and the rest is silence.

From The Australian (who else?)

AND when we come back from the commercial break ... fatwa, women who have forsaken their modesty, convicts and a third sex that is neither male nor female but something in between.

What Australian television sponsors would make of such content is unclear.

On the small screen in Egypt, however, it's a winning line-up guaranteed to keep your audience tuned in.

On Cairo Today on Monday evening, Egyptian time, presenter Amr Adib urged his viewers to keep away from the remote. "We go to commercial break and when we come back we'll talk about this fatwa and what it caused," he said, "and about what the sheik said about a case where a man had raped a woman and about the sentencing. We would like to know your opinion." The sheik referred to is our own foot-in-mouth mufti, Sheik Taj Din al-Hilali, who was described by John Howard yesterday as a "growing embarrassment to his community" and by Opposition Leader Kevin Rudd as being "several sandwiches short of a picnic".

And it's not just that Australians are "the biggest liars and the most unjust", or that the sheik considers us a bunch of no-good convicts with "no democracy and no freedom". The overall picture of Australian society the sheik painted for Cairenes -- who generally consider themselves a cosmopolitan bunch -- is confusing and perhaps even fanciful. "There are nude beaches in Australia and if one goes there wearing clothes is fined (sic). And there are streets like that too," he announced.

Hilali's comments, screened in Australia on Tuesday morning on the Orbit satellite network, have again inflamed his relationship with other Muslims and the community at large.

His Egypt trip was part of a self-imposed exile to allow the furore to die down. Now many politicians have invited him not to return from the Middle East. Immigration Minister Amanda Vanstone called on Hilali to respect Australian society or stay out of the country. "Australians can be forgiven for questioning how seriously Sheik Hilali takes his citizenship pledge to Australia and its people, a pledge that he shared Australia's democratic beliefs and he respected our rights and liberties," she said. "I remind Sheik Hilali that if he doesn't like Australia, our heritage or our way of life, he doesn't have to come back."

Acting Prime Minister Mark Vaile said the comments were what had come to be expected from the sheik. "Obviously, they were totally inappropriate, as we've come to expect from Sheik Hilali," he said. "You would ask yourself a question: 'Why does an individual live in a country where he doesn't agree with the laws of the land?"

After initially brushing aside the comments, a spokesman for the Prime Minister yesterday called the comments inappropriate and urged the Islamic community to resolve the matter.

Dalrymple writes that few read Johnson nowadays. Is this true? Is Johnson less read than that other, Ben ,Jonson? Or than Milton, or Chaucer or Wordsworth or George Eliot? In college courses on criticism several of his Lives of the Poets are assigned and read with pleasure (because Johnson is so pleasurable to read),  "The Rambler" essays are often found in courses on eighteenth-century literature or as examples of the Essay, Rasselas is smuggled into syllabuses as an example of writers using an exotic setting to make a European point, his poems are, or were, in both the Norton and Oxford anthologies for Johnson, along with Gray and Goldsmith, fillins in the period between Dryden and Pope, whose Age comes to an end about 1744,  and the Romantic Age usually marked by the Preface to the Lyrical Ballads in 1798.

Johnson's definition of the task of the critic as one of "improving opinion into knowledge" itself improves with knowledge, and it has been  taken as a guide by many, including Christopher Ricks,  the compiler of the latest Oxford Book of English Verse (see the Oxford Book of Oxford Books). Johnson's Dictionary, admittedly in an abridged version, has been reprinted, and what's more, in paperback, suggesting a wide audience.

All through the 1950s and 1960s, the most popular English course at Harvard, by far, was Walter Jackson Bate's "The Age of Johnson." Perhaps that merely reflected Bate's attractive presentation, but perhaps it was also a reflection of the attractiveness of the reading material. And in that same period there was in fact a great boom in studies and publications devoted to Samuel Johnson, that perhaps began, in this century, with the exciting finds at Malahide Castle, and then with the Yale Johnson beginning to appear, and all those used copies of Johnson and Boswell going to London or to the Hebrides.

Americans taking tours of London appear not to find to their liking those  tour bus guides who take them past luxury hotel after luxury hotel, and point out that "this is where Michael  Jackson stays, in a suite that  costs 4,000 pounds a night" or "over here is where David Bowie likes to stay, reputedly in a suite that costs 5,000 pounds a night" and "this is where Mick and Marianne Faithful spent a month without once leaving the hotel" or, getting away from the hotels, may point out the  LSE "where Mick Jagger, and Nelson Mandela, and I all went." Those tourists much prefer those walking tours of Shakespeare's London, with the Staple Inn and whatever else may survive of the period. And they also do Dickens, visit his house and the mementos within that house, then visit places associated with his fiction, such as the possible model for The Old Curiosity Shop, or the Old Bailey, and of course the Inns of Court. And third, after Shakespeare and Dickens, on the American list, comes not Keats and Hampstead, not Browning (and just a hundred years ago how large were those Browning Societies?), but Johnson, his house, and the ghosts that inhabit it. Johnson is good for anything that ails you, and Americans who have remained unaffected by fashions in literary criticism, who find themselves agitated by the mere thought of what they, or their children, have had to endure from those inflicting their notions of literary theory and literary criticism, are much more likely to find that their minds can only repose on the stability of truth, or rather of all the homely and intelligent truths, as set forth in the prose, poetry, and conversation, recorded by Boswell, whose brain apparently came equipped with a CD-reader-and-burner.

No, no, Hodge shall not be shot. And no, no, Johnson shall not come close to being forgot.

Is this true? A year ago at a library sale I had to be quick to beat two others to the punch when all three of us had our eyes on a good copy of Cruden's Complete Concordance (onion-skin edition). When three people vie for a copy of Cruden’s at a local library sale, that is (admittedly) anecdotal evidence for the continuing truth of the claim in the Preface: "For over two hundred years 'Cruden's Concordance' has been a household word wherever the English language is spoken and the English Bible read."

The copy I bought was published by Lutterworth Press in 1982. When one considers just how many copies of Cruden's Concordance must have been published over the past two hundred years and are still in use, perhaps it is a tribute to consider that before the 1982 edition, there were those, just from Lutterworth alone, published in  1979, 1954, and 1941.  At amazon.com one discovers many other editions of Cruden by other houses, including editions of 1987, 1993, 2001, 2003. If Cruden is “almost entirely forgotten” then why do all these publishing houses keep republishing his Concordance?

Hugh points out that the dispute between Nabokov and Wilson was not just about one word. But wouldn’t it have been more fun if it had been? One word can make all the difference.

A garden is a lovesome thing, God wot!

-according to Thomas Edward Brown (1837 – 1897). According to various schoolboys, and possibly one of the Mitford sisters:

A garden is a lovesome thing. God wot rot.

The Mitford sister or naughty schoolboy who came up with the second version was indignant when he or she was punished for the addition of what, after all, was just one word.

Neil Armstrong was rumoured to have missed out the word “a”, and to have said, confusingly:” That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.”

Sometimes it isn’t even a word, but just a letter. How mortified opera critic Philip Hope Wallace must have been to find that, according to The Guardian, he had reviewed a Covent Garden performance of Doris Godunov.

Many years ago, “Deaf in Venice” was shown at a cinema somewhere in England. Imagine a tormented and confused Aschenbach, unable to respond to the sweet nothings of a coy but eager Tadzio with anything more than: “Eh? Speak up, boy.”