Ghost of a flea

I think that if I take, say, my two favorite English poets, the ones I most often recur to, are Philip Larkin and W.H. Auden. Both of them have a great understanding of tragedy, and a keen feeling of, you know, in some ways, the absurdity of the human condition. But it’s also from the absurdity that they draw things that are quite mordantly funny as well. I don’t think it’s possible to have a sense of tragedy without having a sense of humor.

His fundamental difficulty is that he himself once suffered from, but cannot bring himself to admit, the very fault of which he accuses those in opposition to the war in Iraq: a failure to recognize radical evil. By aligning himself with Trotsky, he declared himself an admirer of a historical project that was, from the very outset, deeply and radically evil—and this is so whatever the motives of its opponents might have been. The man Trotsky, whom he still affects to admire, did not bat an eyelid about executing more people in an afternoon than the Romanovs executed in a hundred years. It would hardly be an exaggeration to say that, by comparison with Trotsky, Nicholas I was a moral giant, and there is no reason whatever to think that a Trotskyite Soviet state would have been a whit better than a Leninist or Stalinist one.