Should we have celebrated VJ Day? Hearing the hieratic tones of the Emperor Hirohito on Radio 4 the other day, announcing the unthinkable — the surrender of the great imperial power to the secular, gas-guzzling, unheeding West — seemed like a profanity. So much came to an end with that surrender that it is not possible to celebrate it, particularly since the method chosen to defeat Japan was nuclear-fuelled genocide, not once — which would have been unforgiveable enough — but twice. Surely the Japanese who survived that monstrous pair of bombings, both of which were without any military or moral justification, were staring at what motivated Guy Crouchback — in Waugh’s trilogy — to take up arms in the first place: ‘The enemy at last was plain in view, huge and hateful. It was the Modern Age in Arms.’
My wife remarked the other day that the Hotel Russell, in Russell Square, had made a mistake some years ago in closing the Virginia Woolf Burger Bar.
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