Michael Howard (the good one, OM, CH, MC) is 94 and still razor-sharp, but depressed by echoes of the 1930s on both sides of the Atlantic — ‘and I am one of the few people still alive who watched it all happen’. At Wellington he learned, and recites to me from memory, lines from Auden’s 1937 ‘Danse Macabre’:
It’s farewell to the drawing-room’s civilised cry,
The professor’s sensible whereto and why
For the Devil has broken parole and arisen,
He has dynamited his way out of prison.
Michael believes that President Trump will get his country into a war, and I hear that some of America’s top soldiers share this expectation.
This is an extract from Max Hastings’ Diary, which appears in this week’s Spectator
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