A couple of interesting articles that caught my eye:

Kenneth Tynan’s profile of Johnny Carson, from the New Yorker, 1978. I have very little idea who Johnny Carson was, but this was a fascinating though very long article about America and about television. Tynan reflects,

Star tennis players are renowned in every country on earth outside China, and the same is true of top heavyweight boxers. (A probable exception in the latter category is Muhammad Ali, who must surely be known inside China as well.) At least fifty living cricketers are household names throughout the United Kingdom, the West Indies, Australia, South Africa, India, and Pakistan. Movie stars and pop singers command international celebrity; and Kojak, Starsky, Hutch, Columbo, and dozens more are acclaimed (or, at any rate, recognized) wherever the TV programs that bear their names are bought and transmitted. Outside North America, by contrast, Johnny Carson is a nonentity: the general public has never heard of him. The reason for his obscurity is that the job at which he excels is virtually unexportable.

He then goes on to add, in a parenthesis that must have come to haunt him,

O. J. Simpson is a parallel case, illustrious at home and nada abroad.

Few of you reading this know who Carne Ross is. I came across him last year, trying manfully to put the pieces of the international community’s Kosovo policy back together again as a senior (and despairing) adviser to the UN Mission there; a British diplomat of about my age who had resigned from the Foreign Office in protest at the Iraq war, and also an aspiring playwright. Yesterday he had a substantial article in the Financial Times giving his own view of how intelligence was used to shape British policy in the run-up to Iraq. Nothing I didn’t already suspect, but very enlightening.