Harry Lime

I'm still reading 'A War Like No Other: How the Athenians and Sparta Fought the Peloponnesian War'. Poster boy that I am for comprehensive education I had no idea at all that the Greek Golden Age was so brief or so burdened with strife. It puts me in mind of Orson Welles' classic speech from The Third Man.

In Italy for thirty years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, bloodshed - but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love, five hundred years of democracy and what did that produce - the cuckoo clock!

Or perhaps the ancient Chinese curse:

May you live in interesting times!

P.S. Victor Davis Hanson (author of 'A War Like No Other') is often caricatured as some sort of loony paleoconservative. This is baloney. Read him here on why the McCain Amendment should be supported. I was so disappointed to hear Condoleezza Rice apparently supporting rendition on the radio yesterday.