The Manchester attack is especially vile but we must go on

The first victim named was from Lancashire, the second an eight-year old girl. Two girls from the isle of Barra in the Western Isles are among those still unaccounted for. A reminder, if it were needed, that though this was an attack in Manchester, the chains of personal connections to the horror stretch all across Britain. You cannot read the stories of those killed or missing without choking, without tears, without appreciating that even by the standards of contemporary terrorism there was something especially vile about this latest atrocity.  

It is natural to feel helpless as well as angry, not least because the imaginative gulf between the norms of civilised society and the mind capable of contemplating, and then committing, this kind of atrocity yawns so wide it’s all but unbridgeable. How do you respond to something you cannot understand? You cannot empathise, even as a hypothetical exercise, with minds that think a concert hall full of teenage girls is a necessary target.

There is no political agenda advanced, in however perverted or despicable a fashion, by this barbarism.