Using Gmail to write to someone in Oxford today when AdSense flashed up a link to www.oxfordcollege.ac. Thinking that it must have missed the “.uk” off the end, I clicked on the link and got this:

It is in fact the website of what appears to be a private establishment offering A-level and GCSE courses. It is physically located in Oxford (on “Floor 231” of an address on the Banbury Road, to be precise), but the .ac domain is in fact that of Ascension Island. Ingenious use of a domain name, don’t you think, though not quite in the del.icio.us league. The photograph, incidentally, shows the Radcliffe Camera, which is a University building.

Now here’s an angle I hadn’t thought of. From Maureen Dowd:

The odd thing is that Obama bears a distinct resemblance to the most cherished hero in chick-lit history. The senator is a modern incarnation of the clever, haughty, reserved and fastidious Mr. Darcy.

Like the leading man of Jane Austen and Bridget Jones, Obama can, as Austen wrote, draw “the attention of the room by his fine, tall person, handsome features, noble mien. …he was looked at with great admiration for about half the evening, till his manners gave a disgust which turned the tide of his popularity; for he was discovered to be proud, to be above his company, and above being pleased.”

The master of Pemberley “had yet to learn to be laught at,” and this sometimes caused “a deeper shade of hauteur” to “overspread his features.”

The New Hampshire debate incident in which Obama condescendingly said, “You’re likable enough, Hillary,” was reminiscent of that early scene in “Pride and Prejudice” when Darcy coldly refuses to dance with Elizabeth Bennet, noting, “She is tolerable; but not handsome enough to tempt me.”

Indeed, when Obama left a prayer to the Lord at the Western Wall in Jerusalem, a note that was snatched out and published, part of his plea was to “help me guard against pride.”

If Obama is Mr. Darcy, with “his pride, his abominable pride,” then America is Elizabeth Bennet, spirited, playful, democratic, financially strained, and caught up in certain prejudices. (McCain must be cast as Wickham, the rival for Elizabeth’s affections, the engaging military scamp who casts false aspersions on Darcy’s character.)

Hmmm… somehow I don’t see McCain as ‘engaging’.

… in 1945, the US dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima. It’s estimated that 66,000 people died that day.

Lots of writers have been trying to reach a valedictory assessment of Alexander Solzhenitsyn since he died. Here is Roger Scruton in openDemocracy, for example:

It is fair to say that the three-volume The Gulag Archipelago did more than any other publication to cause the scales to fall from the eyes of those who had been tempted to believe that communism would have been fine, had it not been perverted from its true course by Stalin. Solzhenitsyn showed the way in which, once accountability has been set aside, as it was set aside by Lenin in 1918, and once society had as a result been conscripted to a single goal, with all institutions gathered up into the collective advance, it is not “corruption” that leads to the triumph of evil. The conditions are now in place for evil to prevail, since there is nothing to prevent it.

Yet this evil should not be seen as an impersonal thing. Solzhenitsyn was far from endorsing the thesis of the “banality of evil” as Hannah Arendt had expounded it. Nor did he see totalitarianism as the ultimate source of the evil that it promotes. Rather totalitarian government is the great mistake, made for whatever noble or ignoble purpose, of putting the final goal before the present dilemma. It is this which gives evil intentions the same chance as good ones, which enables the criminal and the psychopath to compete on a level with the saint and the hero. Yet even in totalitarianism the evil belongs to the human beings, and not to the system. This is the remarkable message that Solzhenitsyn, crawling from the death-machine, carried pressed to his heart.

Eileen Battersby has a rather good piece in the Irish Times in which she argues that his great misfortune was to live long enough to be overlooked in his ‘liberated’ homeland.

HAD HE died about 30 years ago, instead of living on until Sunday to die of heart failure at 89, the 1970 Nobel Prize for Literature laureate Alexander Solzhenitsyn would have been remembered as a hero, a prophet and, above all, a great writer in a country of great writers.

But he made one mistake – he survived.

Not only did he survive the second World War, Stalin’s death camps and stomach cancer, Solzhenitsyn, the author of more than 20 books, who went into exile, initially to Switzerland, and then on to the US where he remained for 17 years, survived communism.

His was not an exile of glamour. By the time Solzhenitsyn had settled in Vermont where his household lived in a high security compound of sorts, surrounded by a high wooden fence, the West had already discovered a far more attractive Russian dissident, Joseph Brodsky, who was possessed of a swagger, an anger he could use to theatrical effect and a willingness to play to the gallery. Aside from all of that Brodsky was only 55, he favoured highly Americanised English, whereas Solzhenitsyn’s was formal. Above all, he repeatedly attacked liberalism. His years in the West saw the one-time prophet become a zealot…

But what Battersby sees as zealotry, Scruton sees as integrity — the persnickety quality that led Solzhenitsyn to attack Western frivolity in his famous Harvard address.