A dry martini can't be faked

  In recent postings, it has been my     pleasure to cite extracts from two 

  great peers of the dry martini, 

  Lord Dacre of Glanton and Dame 

  Edith Sitwell. An odious aspect of     this conduct has been brought to       mind by the ministry of my own          interior, on the principle that one     doesn't tamper with a classic.

  An unassailable postulate, so far

  as postulates go. The tampering, if

  that is what it was, would have had

  to be perpetrated by illustration,

  so obviously remote from context, as

  to act, rather, to insulate text. 

  Still, our self-collarings are the     strictest. I respect their delight.

They are people, such as our-

selves, to whom the gift of

language and its countless 

expressive uses was a life-

long joy. It naturally does

strike us as unfair, to adapt

their texts as cartoons for

our illustrative captions.

This, however, is not what

I did, in exploiting Sit-

well's audibly chuckling

reference to Swift's mer-

curial temperament, and

Trevor-Roper's pure hilar-

ity, in reciting an edict

on devotions. If I must

make it more plain that I

cherish their genius for 

the lark in their dry, dead-

pan demeanor, I would only 

wring graffiti from their

martini, to no good end.

   But there is a fraudulent mode, 

   a collapse of reflection which

   we have begun to see again,

   in the operations of demagogu-

   ery in publications on Crimea.

   The worst, we haven't yet seen;

   but George F. Will's misapprop-

   riation of Timothy Snyder's

   history of Stalin's terror fam-

   ine in Ukraine, revived the

   terrorism with only ersatz

   crusts of reason. To dress

   that grotesquely partisan ser-

   mon with one of Mr Faulkner's

   masterstrokes of sentiment, on-

   ly underscored its shabbiness.

   We are born free of this fault,
   and see quite through its ghosts.