Even great wine can’t quite give me hope for Lebanon

Housman had a point. If men could be drunk for ever, the human condition would be tolerable. But thought always forces its way on to the agenda. ‘And when men think, they fasten/ Their hands upon their hearts.’ This occurred to me in the context of Lebanon. That is a country designed to be a paradise where the nymphs dance to Pan’s pipes. An Arabic-French cultural coalition, modern Lebanon should be an entrancing amalgam of sophistication, religious influences and sensuous delights. Lapped by the Mediterranean, it could draw on 5,000 years of that great sea’s civilisation. There is also the landscape and the climate. For much of the year, you can ski in the morning and swim in the afternoon. All Lebanon needs is peace. ‘Give us peace in our time’ — but God seems deaf to entreaty.

Before the troubles started, Lebanon’s charms had a significant influence on British foreign policy. The Israelis and their friends have often accused the Foreign Office of being the Camel Corps: instinctively pro-Arab. Camels had little to do with it. Lebanon did. In the Fifties and Sixties, aspirant Arabist diplomats studied at the Middle East Centre for Arabic Studies, in Beirut. Coming from austere post-war Britain and the sexual deprivation of overwhelmingly male Oxbridge, they discovered girls, dry martinis and all other ingredients of that delicious Lebanese cocktail, douceur de vie. In later years, struggling with the sterility of peace plans and the inevitability of intransigence, is it any wonder that truant thoughts would sometimes escape back to the days of youth? Remembrance of joys past could be a potent source of bias.

In 1989, I was on a three-day visit to Lebanon that suddenly went pear-shaped. My host, General Michel Aoun, a leader of the Maronite Christians, had decided to eradicate his principal opponent, a fellow called Samir Geagea.