L’Affaire Assange

It seems likely to become the cause celebre of the day.

Not only does it contrast “The law is an ass” Common Sense standpoint which we in Britain, with our long history of legal controversy, have learnt to recognise, with foreigners’ outlandish legal contrivances, and show how embedded in apparent irrelevant circumstances legal matters can become, quite (or nearly quite) fortuitously, on a world wide basis; it also evokes one or two literary connections:

Firstly, with its cavalier use of the word “rape”, it calls to mind Humpty-Dumpty’s claim to semantic authority.

Secondly, the whole terrifying picture of the innocent-until-proved-guilty individual trapped in the machinations of unscrupulous Authority inevitably reminds one of Kafka and “Nineteen Eighty Four”.