High life | 11 June 2015

There’s nothing to add to Martin Vander Weyer’s item about Hellas of two weeks ago in these here pages except a Yogi Berra pearl, ‘It ain’t over till it’s over.’ The Greek drama will go on and on until the brinkmanship is exhausted. The EU has blinked, as I thought it would.

Although Greek accounting arabesques have been known to shame the Bolshoi — Goldman Sachs taught the modern Hellenes how to legally cook the books and screw Brussels, something we are now paying the price for — we Greeks have contributed a few things apart from cheating and not paying our taxes. As Michael Daley wrote in a letter to the Telegraph, Greeks ‘divined architecture in the human body and the proportions of humanity in their architecture’. That singular creative explosion of the 4th and 5th centuries BC has never been equalled. Modern Italians, ashamed of the Roman copycats, suggest that the ancient Greeks even discovered sex, but it took the Romans to include women.