Nothing has been touched or improved in this room for decades. Nothing has been added or taken away. There is the bare minimum of furniture and nothing on the walls. John Pawson would be proud of me.

I do watch satellite television: I had one installed in the communal sitting room of the retreat. I wouldn’t have wanted to miss the documentary on the Prince of Wales the other night on UK TV. 

He is a wonderful and infuriating man. The royals have that extraordinary attention to detail. When the prince pinned a medal on a soldier’s chest, the details of the citation were clear in the royal mind. When he spoke to the soldier, it was as a father, a commander, an awe-struck fan – and almost as a priest. Charles was the state personified. And one realises that such moments are repeated day in day out.

Charles also embodies a perfect oddity in the human spirit. He could charter a large and rather vulgar yacht for a royal visit to the Caribbean and seem no more or less out of place on it than he did discussing the classically rustic hermitage to which he daily retreats when he is at home in Highgrove.

He and I could not be more different, of course. But we share a taste in boats and cells. 

I am inclined to think that it is old-fashioned to obsess on the physical remains of the dead. The soul – whatever that is – has moved on and the rest is just, well, gristle. So I was a bit suspicious when I heard that the New York authorities were trawling through twenty-some thousand human remains – some of them beyond vestigial – and attempting to identify them. Put it another way: it seemed odd to reunite the bereaved with the remains of their loved-ones, again however vestigial.

The testimony of Shiya Ribowsky (not least in his book, Dead Center), the senior coroner leading the project, put me right. A devout orthodox Jew, he clearly believes there is meaning in his work and he has the kind of manner which puts second-guessing at a discount. If it’s good enough for him, it’s good enough for me.

His work is of course driven by technological capability. Since we can now interrogate the merest smudge of human remains, we are bound to. Mourning a representative “unknown soldier” was a moving thought, but it doesn’t survive our ability to identify the remains of all the fallen.

I think the point of the post-mortem forensic DNA work is that it is an attempt to overcome the randomness of the 9/11 slaughter. We have to accept the Humpty-Dumpty nature of the world: we can’t unstir custard. But what terrorists can blast into anonymity, we can to some small extent put together and are bound to want to.

I am growing in sympathy for adopted people who want to know who their biological parents were. A M Homes found herself recognising her biological father’s backside, as she writes in her A Mistress’s Daughter. Not all of it, just aspects. She felt herself connected to this man even though she had reason to resent him. We will never know the precise role of genes and biology in our make-up, and not least because it almost certainly is not remotely precise. I did think she was a bit self-obsessed about her quest for identity. But then – I realised – it is never quite fair to accuse good writers of being self-absorbed. It is in a very real sense what good writers do. What’s interesting about Homes’s case is that she is aware of the modernity of her quest: we may not what genes and DNA do exactly, but we know that we are somehow code-bearers. Homes writes very well about the degree to which bits of her biological parents stick to her, and even of her irritation that she can’t choose those parts, though her four parents variously chose her and chose to abandon her.

The case of the remains of John Henry Newman, the brilliant 19th century English Roman Catholic, reminds us how peculiar and enduring the thread of human remains can be. The Catholic church wanted to relocate Newman’s remains as a precursor to their being the object of veneration and his possibly becoming a saint. God is assumed to transmit his grace through shards of human remains. Or is it that saintly remains hold a remnant of his grace, rather as material may hold radioactivity? The point is especially well made granted that in the absence of remains of the Cardinal’s body in his grave, the church is having to make do with a few threads of clothing which have survived there.

There’s more to the Harris trick. The Ghost takes the business of research and makes the plot hinge on several bits of information as they become available. The Blair/Lang world turns out to be as layered as an onion, so the ghost-writer is peeling away stuff which matters to the story. All marvellous. It came as something of a disappointment that Mr Harris actually holds rather pedestrian views on Blair (at least as revealed in newspaper interviews).

The ghost-writer is himself a fascinating character. I see a sort of Piers Morgan: university-educated, but determined not to rise above the low-brow.

I think what made the book so intensely pleasurable to me is that I have spent many, many hours with powerful people – mostly men – and many of them have been dubious, peculiar and perhaps even wicked. I have written speeches for all sorts, and have sometimes counselled people I suspect of wrong-doing. This is always interesting work, and it is almost always exciting to speculate on how strong people accumulatre influence. The point is that it is always mysterious because it is always about the business of accumulating trust. And there is always the great oddity of really getting to grips with the longing of certain people to make a really big mark in the world. Mr Harris’s ghostwriter wrestles with his thoughts about Lang much as I often have done as I deal with corporate leaders and plenty of others.

For some years I made repeated if half-hearted attempts to become an advisor to Tony Blair. I dared to imagine that I could help him wrestle with the problem of reconciling his urges to be a warrior and a Christian. Anyway, he – or his people – didn’t bite. When I read The Ghost, I found myself missing the essential dilemma in describing (or satirising) Blair. Harris does describe how one never knows whether Blair actually had any conviction or was merely an actor. But Harris avoids altogether the greater piquancy, which is whether Blair had a rather barmy religious conviction about his higher purposes. What’s interesting about Blair is not only whether he had convictions but on what he based whatever convictions he had. Anyway Blair is much more interesting than Lang is.  

Holroyd describes how Irving rose at 5am to swim in the Thames before work. The day done, he attended a “school of arms” in Chancery Lane. Reminiscent of something very similar portrayed in Bleak House, it taught him how to swashbuckle. (By the way, he might have attended to the kind of dancing class also found in Hard Times.) And then to elocution class (attended then and for decades since by most British people keen to get ahead). £100 allowed him to invest in the costumes and kit which equipped him for life on the stage.

The point is that he was just a clerk, but - like millions of his countrymen – he had the imagination and the means to better himself. In my talks with corporates, I call this self-entrepreneurship. It’s not a pretty neologism, but the idea is that one invests in oneself both as a person and a sort of mini-business. Samuel Smiles would have understood.   

“The 1950s were a good time to be a writer in Britain. Change and the redistibribution of priotiries and wealth were everywhere in political, economic and cultural spheres, yet the vantage point that individual thought and creativity stands on was peculiarly solid. Living was cheap and improving materially faster than its cost… [Social gaps were still large] but in the 1950s social permanences that had been bricked in until the war turned out not so resistant after all, and the many-accented voices of the suburbs and provinces, the not-public-schooled, not-county-housed, were no longer bricked out.” (Reference: Semi-invisible Man: The life of Norman Lewis, by Julian Evans. Page 363)

 I may come to that in another post. And I ought to wrte a bit about the bits of Lewis which remind me of James Bond. But for now, I want to note a line of thought of Lewis’ which Evans thinks is of importance. This is that Lewis liked tribal people because they had a sort of

sublime humanity, supreme humanity

and said that he was (in Evans’ words) 

looking for the people who had always been there, and belonged to the places where they lived.

There’ a paradox, of course.

He believed in his own escape reflex (constant de-adherence) and  in the grace of harmonious cultures and of those who belong to them (constant adherence).

I do absolutely see that someone like Lewis is importantly unattached to the places and people he visits for all that he is wholly absorbed in them whilst he’s there. That’s famously the case with journalists. But I have become very sceptical of the admiration of our civilisation for those who are condemned to  what has been called “compulsory belonging”. Ours is a civilisation with flaws, of course. But I don’t think we are wise to believe that only people with tatoos done with sharpened bones have spiritual authenticity.

Let’s leave aside for a moment whether these men are on to anything that will work. Everything about their coming together is a great American story. We meet an immigrant theoretical physicist (Klaus Lackner) who believes carbon can be scrubbed from air. He meets a climatologist (Wallace Broecker) who is inclined to agree. Lackner (as Columbia academic) worked on a late incarnation of the Biosphere project, the failed dream child of a Texan billionaire (Ed Bass). It was an attempt to replicate the earth’s atmosphere in a manmade bubble. There’s a practical mechanic (Allen Wright) who is fired when the Biosphere finally fails. His brother (Burt Wright ) is a Tucson fireman who works with ventilation systems. Broecker hooks all these men up with a further billionaire (Gary Comer), who agrees to fund an attempt to build and (patent) carbon scrubbers.

The team have made some kit which works. To cut to the chase, the US would need tens of millions of units about the size of lorry containers. (Quite how many depends on how many big power stations mop up their carbon emissions at source.) Luckily, these container-sized units could be anywhere, and they could be near disposal sites for the carbon-dioxide waste they’re designed to produce. But disposal seems to be a whole other dimension of problem.

I imagine that whether we “solve” climate change, or merely survive it, the story of the solutions we find will often look like this. Academics, mechanics and entrepreneurs will be crucial, and chance, inspiration and adventure will be at the core of it all. Quixotic people will turn out to have been invaluable. 

I am a natural royalist. Monarchy, opera, hunting and monasticism are similarly irrational, even absurd. And well worth defending. It would be tempting to do so because they are ancient. But that might take one toward celebrating torture and wouldn’t help you to defend opera. No comfort there, then. The best defence of any of them is that they are glamorous.

Princess Anne is the patron of the organisation which looks after the lighthouses of Britain’s northern coasts. But she’ s said to be a collector: an acquisition pharologist. It seems a wonderfully batty thing to be, and wholly admirable. The Times says she’s going round, ticking them off like a bird twitcher. Some, she sails to with her Navy husband.

Lord knows how she gets to the others. Probably on some sort of service vessel, as Robert Louis Stevenson did when he was still trying to prove to his father that he wanted to be a lighthouse engineer. That was before RLS tried to persuade his father that he wanted to be a lawyer. The story is beautifully told (though there’s not enough on lighthouses) in Claire Harman’s RLS biography, which I’d say is destined to be a classic. RLS was not keen to be a lighthouse engineer in the way of his grandfather and father. But he did like any kind of sea voyage and even went diving (at one his father’s sea defences) when to do so must have seemed a very hazardous thing to do. Like Anne and her husband, he liked married yachting, renting a schooner for Pacific cruises before taming bits of a tropical rainforest. Always thought to be on the point of death, discomfort and adversity seemed to invigorate him.

By the way, the Harman biography notes that Stevenson’s religious father’s wrestles with Darwinism matched those of Edmund Gosse’s father (who had his own seaside obsessions, as a naturalist). That story is told in Ann Thwaite’s biography of Gosse, which well matches Harman’s for sympathy and vigour. Gosse met and liked RLS, but then so did everybody, including, eventually, Henry James who didn’t take to him at first. (The correspondence between James and RLS, an almost incredibly different pair, made a neat book of its own.)

Nixonland is a vivid piece of work. It’s almost a film script. It sets scenes in the most deft way.

Perlstein describes the emergence of the hippie-straight split, as I said. Eggheads and hard hats were ranged against one another. Nixon managed to ride the massive, unpredicted surge of reaction, patriotism, religiosity, plain clean-ness with which so many Americans met the new world. Nixon experienced a new politics in which he could herd “hard-hat” natural Democrats into the Republican fold. Much of the anti-Vietnam war sentiment which McGovern expressed produced the effect that Nixon gained votes as the man who would most likely stop the war. Nixon could never actually have a victory, because he only really felt the defeat which nestled within it. In 1972, he had an enemy Congress. (”So that’s how they’ll piss on this thing”, he said, or words to that effect.)

This business of making the lower orders vote for capitalism has usually had an element of patriotism to it. That’s the ancient conservative game when it comes to making poor people vote against their own interests. or to be more subtle about it: conservatives have to persuade poor people that preserving the rich is the only way to banish poverty. The flag shoos in the waverers. Nixon succeeded by dissing the peace movement and offering peace.

The right often wins by seeming economically capable, even if it means the rich can’t be squeezed until the pips squeak. But they need populism to pull the rick off. Reagan did it by being a down home boy who offered economic vitality to all. Margaret Thatcher did it by being the anti-establishment provincial promising that she could snatch power for the people from the unions. David Cameron seems determined to go back to Peel’s old formula: a Tory delivering enough Whig policy to be very attractive.

So as we look at McCain vs Obama, do we think Perlstein’s thesis is at work? In all the endless discussion of Obama vs Clinton, Obama was more liberal-elite than Clinton, and had plenty of black appeal too. Wow. No-one could have predicted the first bit of that equation. That left Clinton, the entitlement, establishment candidate trying to look hard hat. It wasn’t easy. And then there was the internet, bringing cash and support from quarters no-one had ever tapped.

In all, it seems as though Perlsetin may be describing a politics which is largely dead. America’s choice is – as usual – tricky. The Republicans are offering experience, volatilty, courage and a big dollop of liberalism (that is, leftish policy). Oh, and a candidate the most active Republicans don’t like. The Democrats are offering blackness, youth, vigour, vagueness, the internet, inexperience and a big dollop of liberalism.

If that picture’s right, then Perlstein story of paranaoia, fear and one great cultural divide has shattered into a far more complicated and nuanced picture. But also a much more relaxed one.