So it is no accident that I launch the first farrago of my autumn term with that hoary cri de coeur, since it was the uproarious stand-up Hermann Goering who, when he heard the word culture, reached for his Browning, and his plucky Luftwaffe will shine brightly in what follows – along with the royal family, Enid Blyton, Claridge’s, the broad sunlit Cotswolds, the News of the World, and Cadbury’s Fruit & Nut, and you cannot get more cultural than that. All this, because the first thing I did at Heathrow was buy The Times. It held two glorious stories. The first concerned MI5’s revelation of the cunning 1940 plan by some Nazi Baldrick to parachute saboteurs into rationed Britain, who would distribute chocolate bars and tinned plums and fizzy drinks to the salivating war-deprived. The joyful beneficiaries would then scuttle off to gobble their covert goodies, and a few seconds later, blow themselves to bits, for the goodies the baddies had slipped them were bombs: you snapped the chocolate, opened the tin, unscrewed the bottle, and went bang.
