One of the handicaps of old age is the loss, one by one, of those few commentators and journalists to whom one has long looked for guidance as to what was going on in the world. Such geniuses did not necessarily provide any specific information so much as an insight into events – an answer to the question succinctly posed by Lenin: “Who, whom?” How often in recent years I have heard friends lament, along with me, that Auberon Waugh is no longer around to give us his take on our modern world – on Brexit, on Donald Trump, on Meghan Markle. When he died in 2001 there was with many of us a feeling similar to that expressed about the death of the great journalist William Cobbett in 1835 by the diplomat Sir Henry Lytton Bulwer: