Blindfolds and mindmists

Without the existence of ‘apparently [my italics] sophisticated circles’, which the great historian and poet Robert Conquest also calls ‘an intellectually semi-educated class’ (soon abbreviated into just ‘cerebral jellies’) his latest book would never have been written. For its express purpose, he avers, is to tease ‘these misinformed strata’ — yet another description — into abandoning the ‘brain blindfolds’ and ‘mindmists’ which have robbed them of all sense of present realities and future possibilities. Since it goes without saying that Spectator readers, never having been seduced by Stalin, tempted by communism, or by any of the other Utopianisms of the 20th century, come into none of these derisive categories, it might be thought that this chasteningly, sardonic book is not for them.

No so, however, for two reasons. First it is always enjoyable to watch a master dialectian scoring knockouts, in Conquest’s case without ever hitting below the belt, particularly when the targets include world-revered left-wing icons like the Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm and Nobel Prize-winner Dorothy Hodgkin.