Many years ago, a friend described one of my serious literary novels as ‘clever’. I was offended – but I shouldn’t have been. The friend was from across the pond, where I now understand ‘clever’ simply means smart. For Americans, cleverness infers a shallow, facile intelligence. Applied to people, it often hints at sly, calculating deviousness or cunning. It has no positive moral qualities, as westerners understand them. Tax evasion can be ‘clever’.

Let’s move on to ‘culture’ – a big, fuzzy word we throw about with careless abandon that often summons images of traditional clothing and cuisine. But, parsed in its most profound sense, culture might best be defined as ‘what a people admire and what they deplore’.

Culture might best be defined as ‘what a people admire and what they deplore’

Now we’ve got our terms straight, a trigger warning: I plan to make sweeping over-generalisations. But we freely make sweeping generalisations about western nationalities. Supposedly, Americans are gun nuts, Germans control freaks, the French hedonists, etc. All those postulations are too broad but contain a kernel of truth. So I claim the same latitude to make wholesale characterisations of elsewhere.

Finally, our peg. Christopher Rufo and Ryan Thorpe recently authored an investigative report for City Journal (a brilliantly written, data-driven magazine based in New York) entitled ‘The Largest Funder of al Shabaab is the Minnesota Taxpayer’. It describes a set of systematic schemes (in the American sense; more fun with linguistics! For Brits, ‘schemes’ are neutral programmes; for Yanks, ‘schemes’ are always........

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