Golden lads and girls

In the first century bc, the wrestler Nicophon of Miletus was said to have a physique which would have made Zeus himself tremble. He literally outstripped his rivals at the Olympic Games. Nicophon’s mere name, Victory Voice, announced a champion, just as that of Schwarzenegger did in the Mr Universe — and, more recently, in the Mr Governor of California — contests. He had only to flex himself for the rest of the field to wilt.

Fantastic is the lid-off Arnie of Thal, an Austrian village in which his father, once of the Nazi party, was postwar police chief. Laurence Leamer’s low-down becomes a pedestal on which Arnie’s occasionally lovable hunkishness is jacked up even higher. How high can he go? Although the Constitution of the United States expressly requires a presidential candidate to be born on US soil, what’s an iron rule when the Terminator gets his hands on it?

In the present climate of American justice (in which, as Gary Indiana says, the Supreme Court can decree George W.