So farewell then, Ayatollah Khamenei. I’m put in mind of Private Eye’s cover on the death of Hendrik Verwoerd. “A Nation Mourns” read the headline, under a photograph of four black Africans in ceremonial dress leaping joyfully in the air in a traditional dance. Nobody’s going to be sorry he’s gone.

The received wisdom tends to skirt the possibility that some senior Nazis may have been quite cultured

The received wisdom tends to skirt the possibility that some senior Nazis may have been quite cultured

But reading his obituary, I confess to surprise and dismay. What was to be found there was not, at least at first, an austere and viciously power-hungry religious monomaniac. Here, from what we know, was somebody who at least in his younger years was disciplined, modest, intellectually curious, and artistically inclined.

“He was said to live an austere, ascetic existence and enjoy gardening,” the Sunday Times reports. “As a young man he loved Persian poetry and music, played a traditional stringed instrument called a tar and read Western authors including Leo Tolstoy, Jean-Paul Sartre, John Steinbeck and Victor Hugo.” Yet, obviously, this did nothing to prevent his wielding power in a monstrous way.

He was a total drittsek, and the regime he presided over – as “part Pope, part Commander-in-Chief and part Supreme Court” – is as foul a theocracy as is to be found anywhere. When he read........

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