UR TV CAST

Read notes on gallery walls and you wish you’d never been born Everything so neat and understood Every mystery solved Every inconsistency ironed over. Pity more don’t learn from his example.But all that said, it was in the act of entering his milieu that I felt the 20th century – my century, after all – suddenly turn ridiculous on me Partly the fault of the gallery notes, I accept. He painted those women in the streets of Berlin wearing spears for feathers, drew himself into corners, a voyeur in the dark, fetishising breasts and gloves, and let the times bleed him of his vitality. He has the decency to go ghostly on it, to let it swallow him at last. Whereas the towering geniuses won’t let go, hanging on in the hope the age will expire before they do.Such sycophantic exponents of the contemporary they are, too, such spaniels to their times, such tireless pleasers Kirchner, finally, was neither pleased nor pleasing.

He isn’t a towering 20th-century genius like Picasso, or even, to my mind, a near towering 20th-century genius like Beckmann or Dix But that’s precisely why I like him He doesn’t quite give the age what the age demanded. Sometimes I believe I get German Expressionism; sometimes I don’t – depends how disgusted I am feeling with my fellow men – but Kirchner I go on admiring. It’s culture I’m thinking about, high culture, the stuff of modernist poets and painters. Is it possible that, viewed culturally, the 20th century was from start to finish tosh?
It’s going to the Kirchner exhibition at the Royal Academy that has made me ask this question I like Kirchner. We must now ask, however, how it was arrived at: was it through informed argument, or was it perhaps by the time-honoured method of suppressing the views of such awkward experts as Dr Kelly and Mr Wilkie, and keeping them out of the information supply chain?If this is so, the non-discovery so far of Iraq’s lethal weapons should prompt a comprehensive review of how information, including top-secret intelligence, is passed to the politicians and how the politicians then use it. Even then, not only was Dr Kelly briefed by the Ministry of Defence not to say a word about his views on Iraq’s weapons, but also members of the committee were briefed – and agreed – not to ask him! The reason why he had been called was clearly not because of his unique weapons expertise, but his unique ability to discredit the BBC’s controversial claim about “sexing up”.At the time when war with Iraq was approaching, the uniformity of the message emanating from London, Washington and – as we now see – Canberra was remarkable For some, that uniformity made it all the more persuasive.

At least, all the top people across Whitehall and No 10 we have heard from so far deny catching the slightest hint of any internal dissent.By the time Dr Kelly made his fateful appearance before the Commons Foreign Affairs Committee in July, two months had elapsed since the war and still no Iraqi weapons had been found. Their – expert – views were either not forwarded to the Ministry of Defence or blocked somewhere else along the route. Dr Kelly, one of the country’s most eminent experts on biological weapons, told his superiors that he disagreed with the way some of the intelligence data was presented well before he conveyed his misgivings to journalists.Two senior intelligence officials felt so strongly about the use of their data that they wrote to the head of Defence Intelligence to object. Among the greater truths to have emerged from the Hutton inquiry is that, while pressing its case for war, the Government did its utmost to prevent dissenting views from reaching the public domain, especially if those views were held by people who were experts in their field. In a vehement (fluent Australian) denial, Mr Howard accused Mr Wilkie of “slandering decent people” and suggested that he had not had access to the relevant intelligence.Switch to London.