So science has pronounced.  The final, seemingly unanswerable question has apparently been answered.  Woman and her mystique lies bared beneath the detached, indeed pitilessly disinterested gaze of, to all intents and purposes, androgenous scientific enquiry.

The varying ease with which women reach sexual climax is more heavily influenced by genetic factors than any other, British scientists have found. Inheritance outstrips the contributions made by upbringing, culture or male bedroom skills.

The study of almost 1,400 pairs of female twins revealed that genes affect arousal at least as strongly as they do medical conditions in which their role has long been established, such as hypertension, migraine and depression.

It also suggests that the elusiveness of the female orgasm is evolved, probably because it confers a reproductive advantage that is triggered only with a particularly desirable partner ...

... “The theory goes that if a man is considered powerful enough, strong enough or thoughtful enough, in bed or in the cave, then he’s likely to hang around as a long-term partner and be a better bet for bringing up children,” Professor Tim Spector, of St Thomas’ Hospital in London, who led the research, said.

“Women who orgasm too easily might be less good at selecting partners.”

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There was a fleeting moment during my curious boyhood when it seemed possible that I might actually transmogrify into … an academic pupil.  I treasure the memory.  Purley Grammar School for Boys it was, on a September day in the late 1960’s.  An upstairs classroom overlooking the quad.  Chalk dust caught in the sunlight, rows of ink-stained desks, twenty uninterested, fish-eyed youths, Dougie Firmer and old Nicholson.

Dougie was the school genius.  It was already accepted that he was on his way in two years to Cambridge and then some top-Gag career in the higher etherium of the State.  Frankly, we were in awe not only of his intelligence but of his quite unreal urbanity.  Not only was he all brilliant polish for a seventeen year-old but he was brilliantly funny, too, and a natural mimic and extemporiser.  If by chance after the boiled ham and carrots he’d begin to extemporise in the lower sixth common room on the subject, say, of how old Jewitt got his limp or Rainforth his taste in shoes everyone quieted down instantly.  You knew to shut your silly prattle when Dougie gave forth, and belly-laugh with the best.

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Today, as the peoples of Europe blink with amazement at last week’s momentous referenda, the political elite of the continent are mulling over their options.  The bottom line takes just six words to summarise: don’t let the British change things.

In Berlin tonight Chirac and Shroeder – one who challenged his people to consent to the Constitution and lost, and the other who dare not challenge them at all – must contemplate the awful cost of political failure.

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Apologies to all our readers for the several hours today during which the blog was down.  No explanation has been forthcoming from our web hoster as yet, but it appears to have been a simple tech failure.  As if it could possibly be anything else!

In a seven-minute televised address yesterday President Chirac responded to the people’s resounding rejection of the EU Constitution.  There are three (not unpredictable) threads to his response.

1. The direction of Europe will not be fundamentally affected by the May 29 vote.  Chirac said quite specifically, “It was not a rejection of the European ideal. It was a demand to be heard, a demand for action, a demand for results.”  The people – as all elites averr when it suits them – were not answering the question put before them.  They were voting on the French economy.

2. As a rejection of French unemployment the vote was also a rejection of the Anglo-Saxon economic model (code for market discipline) with which the Constitution was, apparently, heavily imbued.  You might consider this perverse and an egregious conflation.  But Chirac is an opportunist, like all politicians, and the referendum vote provides an opportunity to rein in British influence in Europe.

3. The French governmental predeliction for paternalism and elitism sails on unaffected.  Chirac explained his Prime Ministerial appointment of Dominique de Villepin as a response to “worries” and “expectations” about, basically, unemployment.  Quite what “action” and “results” a career diplomat, gris eminence and would-be man of letters who has never once stood for election will be able to effect (and through “The French model”) remains to be seen.

Plus ça change …

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The ‘freedom’ we have gained is therefore but mere licence for us to behave as to the manner born, destined to build a society consumed by corruption, sexual depravity, autocracy and criminal violence

No, not Thabo Mbeki reflecting on the difficulties of post-apartheid South Africa.  The quote is from a Telegraph article today, and shows Mbeki wackily characterising the supposed opinion of UK Chancellor Gordon Brown in a weekly Presidential epistle to the on-line newsletter, ANC Today.

“President Thabo Mbeki of South Africa rebuked Gordon Brown yesterday,” the Telegraph article begins, “accusing the “presumed successor to Tony Blair” of promoting nostalgia for British imperialism and joining in a “discourse” that “demonises” blacks.”

Mbeki, of course, is a specialist in denial.  So we should not be surprised that he denies those social and economic outcomes the rest of the world wearily anticipates from his people.  He once even found it in him to answer the anti-rape campaign of vicitim-activist Charlene Smith, writing in ANC Today only in the most general terms about ‘contact crime’ (rather than rape) and ascribing the causes to poverty and community degradation.  Mountainous peaks in Serum Testosterone rythmicity, did you say? Never heard of it.

Meanwhile, the latest target of Mbeki’s wrath - our once-prudent Chancellor and PM-in-waiting - is working hard to solve Africa’s crises from without.  That also, in its way, is an act of sublime denial.  Mbeki, apparently, does not recognise a kindred spirit when he sees one.

I noticed that John Ray’s “Dissecting Leftism” today has a link to a Thomas Woods article criticising the PC version (or is it the Monty Python version?) of the history of the Crusades. Readers interested in this issue should check out the work of historian Thomas Madden who is a crusades specialist.

Madden dispels some popular myths about the Crusades here but perhaps more importantly points out how mythology about the crusades impacts modern foreign policy debate here.

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We French hate the perfidious English.  We French have always hated the perfidious English.  We French hate the perfidious English for being … perfidious.  And English.  And for positively refusing to be invaded by Germans when we French managed it so effortlessly.  Twice.  And for letting us deceive ourselves that all those English SOE agents running around organising Le Resistance were … French.  Unacceptable.  And then, mon Dieu, there was Waterloo … Trafalgar … Agincourt … the ‘andbag of Madame Thatcher …

Entente cordial?  Never.  A ridiculous, impossible idea.

Ah, but we French used to love “Europe” before the English insinuated themselves into it.  It was the very essence of French dirigisme.  And OK, Germany was the economic engine.  But France held the political power.  That was the deal.  The English, of course, were not included.  That was also the deal.  Anyway, they had their “special relationship” with the Americans.  But that didn’t worry us.  We French hated the Americans.

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