Today he's no less confused. When he looks around him, in the aftermath of the invasion of Iraq, he sees a community of left-leaning liberals standing on their heads apologising for militant Islam. Why have men and women of the left denied the existence of serb concentration camps? why is palestine a cause for the liberal-left, but not, for instance, china, the sudan, Zumbabwe likely to read that a sinister conspiracy of jews controlled American or British foreign policy in a liberal literary journal as in a neo-nazi rag? It's easy to know what the left is fighting against - the evils of bush and the corporations - but what, and more to the point, who are they flighting for?