It may have been observed that no issue of Free Life appeared between last October and January. The blame for this lapse is entirely mine, but the reason is Edward Gibbon. I opened the first volume of his Decline and Fall one Sunday afternoon in September, and closed the last volume early in December. During this time, almost every moment not reserved to earning a living or to the cares of married life was given up to reading Gibbon. I read him on railway trains and in the gaps between lectures. I read him in bed and once very furtively in the Church of St Mary le Bow. I read him sometimes with enthusiasm and sometimes with helpless envy. I read him sometimes with impatience. But always I read him in the knowledge that he was the greatest of English historians, and one of the four or five greatest of all historians, and easily one of the greatest of all English writers.

I cannot understand the belief, generally shared these past two centuries, that the golden age of English literature lay in the century before the Civil War. I accept the Prayer Book and the English Bible as works of genius that will be appreciated so long as our language survives. I admire the Essays of Francis Bacon and one or two lyrics. But I do not at all regard Shakespeare as a great writer. His plays are ill-organised, his style barbarous where not pedantic. I am astonished how pieces like A Midsummer Night's Dream and Romeo and Juliet, with their long, ranting monologues, can be thought equal to the greatest products of the Athenian theatre. I grant that Julius Caesar is a fine play - but only because Shakespeare stayed close to his ancient sources for the plot, and wrote in an uncharacteristically plain style. Perhaps I am undeveloped in some critical faculty; and I know that people whose judgements I trust have thought better of him. But I cannot see Shakespeare as a great writer or his age as the greatest in our literature.

For me, the golden age begins with Dryden and Congreve, and continues into the 18th century with Pope, Swift and Addison. It holds up until nearly the end of that century, after when there is a gentle decline towards the murkier style of the Victorians.

The strengths of the Augustans were clarity and balance in their writing, and in the thought that this reflected a strong regard for truth and a dislike of enthusiasm. In Gibbon, these virtues are carried about as far as they can go. Granted, his style is often rather feline. Granted, he generally insinuates his theological views where he dares not assert them. Granted, his footnotes are littered with the most comic vanity that any historian ever displayed; and his readers are always aware of M. Pomme de Terre wandering up and down his study in his club wig and coat, composing those matchless sentences, and every so often glancing lovingly up at the portrait of himself hung just above the fireplace. But what matchless sentences they are, and how devastating they can be in the cause of enlightenment and humanity.

Take, for example, a passage from one of the later and so less frequented chapters - No 51. The Arabs are said to have burned the Alexandrian Library on their conquest of Egypt - claiming that either its contents agreed with The Koran, and so were superfluous, or they contradicted it, in which case they were blasphemous. Gibbon doubts the testimony of the first historian to have mentioned the event. He continues in his smoothest and most reasonable manner:

The rigid sentence of Omar is repugnant to the sound and orthodox precept of the Mahometan casuists; they expressly declare, that the religious books of the Jews and Christians, which are acquired by the right of war, should never be committed to the flames; and that the works of profane science, historians or poets, physicians or philosophers, may be lawfully applied to the use of the faithful. A more destructive zeal may perhaps be attributed to the first successors of Mahomet; yet in this instance, the conflagration would have speedily expired in the deficiency of materials. I should not recapitulate the disasters of the Alexandrian library, the involuntary flame that was kindled by Caesar in his own defence, or the mischievous bigotry of the Christians, who studied to destroy the monuments of idolatry. But if we gradually descend from the age of the Antonines to that of Theodosius, we shall learn from a chain of contemporary witnesses, that the royal palace and the temple of Serapis no longer contained the four, or the seven, hundred thousand volumes, which had been assembled by the curiosity and magnificence of the Ptolemies.

Then comes the flash of steel:

Perhaps the church and seat of the patriarchs might be enriched with a repository of books; but if the ponderous mass of Arian and Monophysite controversy were indeed consumed in the public baths, a philosopher may allow, with a smile, that it was ultimately devoted to the benefit of mankind.

I first read this passage in 1987, lying on my bed at about three in the morning. I nearly cried with laughter then, and I still laugh as I transcribe the sentence. One needs to know about the disputes over the nature of Christ that disgrace the Church between the reigns of Constantine and Justinian, to appreciate the full weight of Gibbon's scorn; but the contrast between "library" and "repository of books", between "patriarch" and "philosopher", and the descent of time from the Antonines to Theodosius, tells us all that needs to be known of what he thought about Christianity.

As said, this was not my first meeting with Gibbon. I was twelve when I found him in the abridgement by D.M. Low. As an undergraduate, I made use of him in the J.B. Bury edition up till the reign of Heraclius and the Arab conquests. In my late twenties, I went through him again in a desultory manner, skipping chapters that did not interest me. But it was only last year that I read him in the full and proper order, from the military resources of the Antonines to the revival of Rome under the Renaissance Popes - one and a half million words of the only historical work in English still to be in print and read and appreciated after two centuries. I commend him to the readers of Free Life. Indeed, I may even review him in full for the next issue. I do not agree entirely with his judgement on Christianity or on the Byzantine Empire; and I am at work on a long article about the demographic and political consequences of the Great Plague of 542, the extent of which Gibbon describes without being able to appreciate. For the moment, however, I am hurrying to get this issue written, so that Mr Tatchell's manifesto can be made public, and so must leave Gibbon to another time.
 

Last December, I was invited to the Adam Smith Institute Christmas party. As ever, this was an enjoyable event, giving me the chance to catch up with friends and acquaintances I had not seen as much as I wanted during the previous year. The room was very crowded, with more people coming in until perhaps midway through the evening; and moving round was not at all easy. Even so, I found David Marsland, and was soon exchanging news and gossip.

After a few minutes of this, however, there was one of those odd collective shudders that turns a crowd momentarily fluid in ways that none of the individuals comprising it either wants or understands. I was torn away from Dr Marsland. John Hibbs was hurried past me in the other direction with barely time to smile and begin a greeting. When the crowd solidified again, I found myself opposite an old man in a suit so shabby that he could only have been a politician. Though he had no name badge - the ASI is keen to avoid the formalities of introduction and the frequent embarrassments of its absence - and though his face had aged and turned grey since his days of greatness, I finally recognised the old man as Michael Howard. That is, he was Home Secretary under John Major, and as such was the worst holder of that office between its establishment in 1782 till the appointment after him of the still worse Jack Straw.

I rather think he might now be Sir Michael Howard. But since I do not care to recognise any honour granted on the motion of Tony Blair, I will refer to him as plain Mr Howard - which is far more than he deserves.

"Who are you, then?" Mr Howard asked with a simper half shy half slimy. He looked at my own name badge and grunted: "Oh, Libertarian Alliance".

I resisted the urge to say exactly what I thought of him. My readers may recall the horrid things I said about him during the middle 1990s in these pages - about his abolition of the right to silence, his asset confiscation laws, his proposals for identity cards and limitations of the right to Trial by Jury. But I was a guest; and much as Madsen Pirie might agree with my sentiments, I felt a duty not to upset one of his guests. So I said in as neutral a tone as I could manage:

"The Libertarian Alliance was not among your greatest fans when you were in the last Government."

Suddenly, Mr Howard smiled. "But I'm as much a libertarian as you are. I believe passionate in the right of ordinary people to walk the streets in safety."

I dug my fingernails into my palms. Stopping street crime does not need the establishing of a police state, complete with intrusive surveillance of people in their homes on the verbal permit of a police officer. All that needs is to let people defend themselves effectively when attacked, and to impose real punishments on real criminals convicted by due process of law - for neither of which Mr Howard showed the least enthusiasm in office. But I was resolved on politeness, so I changed the subject.

"I must congratulate you on your disapproval of the Serbian War last spring" I said. But the smile grew wider, and Mr Howard's face settled into the oily smugness I remember from so many speeches to Party Conference.

"You surely mistake me" he cried. "I was absolutely in favour of the war to relieve the suffering people of Kossovo. If I had any criticism, it purely concerned the Government's half-hearted execution of the war."

I was rescued from more of this by another collective shudder that took me to a Lebanese woman with a Greek name, who prosed on forever about regulation of the private healthcare sector.

When I got home, I made sure to give myself the hot bath in need of which my five minutes with Mr Howard had left me. But three months later, the spiritual dirtying of those minutes has still to be cleansed. However late it would have been, and however futile, I really should have put manners aside and told the shameless traitor and fiend Michael Howard what I thought of him. Instead of holding them back, I should have let the words out in one vast, burning gush. At the very least, I might have put him off the canapés.
 

With Mrs Gabb, I went to the pictures last week, to see Topsy Turvy. This film covers the year in the lives of Gilbert and Sullivan between the opening of Princess Ida and of The Mikado. It was an astonishingly good film. The performances were wholly convincing. The actors who played Gilbert and Sullivan brought them to life as I have never seen done in other biographical films. The actors who played singers could sing, and those who played musicians could play their instruments. Moreover, the background was properly drawn. Late Victorian England was revealed to us - not in the BBC sense of street scenes and hansom cabs, but in the sense that I could think the cinema screen a window into another world.

And what a splendid world it was. It had elegance and manliness and multiple drug abuse - that is, all the things one might expect to find in a free society. The dentists would disappoint me; but a few rotten teeth might be a price worth paying for the right to jump through that cinema screen and seek asylum in a freer and therefore a better world.

Then there were the performances of the works. When I was a boy in the 1970s, I went to dozens of performances by the D'Oyley Carte Opera Company. With the exception of a Yeoman of the Guard from late 1975, these were awful. The orchestra played badly - and played too fast in an effort to cover the bad notes. The performers were obviously bored with what they were doing. The sets and costumes had all seen better days. There were gramophone records that showed how the operas should sound; but I never saw reason to respect their appearance on stage. Topsy Turvy has recreations of how Gilbert wanted them to appear, and most impressive it was. I hope someone will now try for a proper staging of at least The Mikado.