"In night go view the solemn stars, / Ever in majesty the same — / Creation's world's; how poor must seem / The mightest honors earth can name — / And most of all this strife / After the bubble, Fame!" Walt Whitman (1819-1892), The Winding-Up.

The great thing about this video is that it supplies all the French one needs to know to sound knowledgeable about the event: Reportage sur moto, les équipes, les étapes... Tres cool!

This was the ideal opportunity for a courageous Rainy Day to have shouted out, "Where is the stimulus, Bruce? You campaigned for Hope and Change, remember!" But fearing what thousands of manic, Germanic Obama cultists might do to such a heretic, we let it go. Still, someone is going to start asking questions soon. As Camille Paglia pointed out in Salon last month: "Within the U.S., the Obama presidency will be mainly measured by the success or failure of his economic policies. And here, I fear, the monstrous stimulus package with which this administration stumbled out of the gate will prove to be Obama's Waterloo. All the backtracking and spin doctoring in the world will not erase that major blunder, which made the new president seem reckless, naive and out of control of his own party, which was in effect dictating to him from Capitol Hill."

So, the next time Bruce Springsteen comes to town, he'd better not try the "Lota folks hurtin' back home right now" line or he'll be gettin' a helluva hecklin' here. Guess that's me committed to buying another ticket, then. Talking of hard times, the highlight of last night's concert for us was the heartbreaking This Hard Land. Dylan would be proud of him here.

9 September 1998: The bodies of thirty-four people, including both ethnic Serbs and Albanians, were found in an artificial lake near the village of Glodjane.

26 September 1999: Serbian special police forces massacred twenty-one members of the Delijaj family, including women and children, one as young as eighteen-months-old, in Gornje Obrinje.

What starts as a search for answers, soon turns into a dangerous obsession that takes Solomon into the dark heart of the Kosovo economy. It turns out that the place is the European centre of the sex slavery trade. Groups of young women are sold at public auctions to pimps, who then traffic them to Rome, Berlin and London and keep them enslaved indefinitely as they generate huge amounts of money for their "owners". And everyone, from the local police to the employees of the international aid agencies, is in on the act as Solomon discovers.

Stephen Leather has created an original and highly-readable novel with The Eyewitness. The Balkans, with all their brutality, are authentic and his take on the NGO industry, with its idealists and its cynics, is convincing. Best of all though, is the realism of his characters. When Jack offers a young prostitute in London a chance to escape from the trade, their conversation goes like this:

"Jack, it's all right. I choose this life, I wasn't forced into it."
"That's not true," said Solomon. "If you had money, you wouldn't have to do what you do."
"And if you were rich, would you do your job? Would you spend your time telling people that their loved ones are dead?"
"It's not the same," said Solomon.
"To me it is," said Inga. "We do what we must to survive. Neither of us takes pleasure in what we do, but we do it, and we make the best of it."

Le Carré should have written this novel in 2002. The deeds of Mohamed Atta were fresh in everyone's mind then and somewhere between the ruins of the World Trade Center, the incompetence of Germany's "intelligence" services and Hamburg's accommodation of anti-American fanatics were the components of a novel that needed to be written.

Instead, we get a farrago of half-baked beliefs about Islamism and the West that belong more in the Guardian than in a thriller. A Most Wanted Man is an unworthy end to John le Carré's writing career.

Chapter 5: "That evening Nora cooked a penne with a vodka sauce she made from scratch. A tossed salad and a bottle of Brunello from Jeffrey's private celler. Dinner was served. Everything just so. The way he liked it."

Chapter 32: "The next morning, a Friday, Nora walked out of the house in Westchester and popped open the trunk of the Benz convertible parked in front."

Chapter 57: "The next day Nora drove back to Manhattan and directly to the Bliss spa in her SoHo neighbourhood. She had a carrot-and-sesame body buff as well as a hot oil massage. This was followed by a manicure and a pedicure."

And so on, and on, and on. The secret of Patterson's success is that he sells envy, not fiction.

Well, the people's King of Pop is neither troubled nor troubling anymore, but we do hope that this short excerpt from the Missa pro defunctis by Orlande de Lassus (1532—1594), and sung by The Hilliard Ensemble, will help soothe the pain felt by all of those who shared his joys, sorrows, troubles and genius.

No, it's not George Orwell in 1948 or Steve Jobs in 1984. it was 116 years ago that Nym Crinkle made his remarkable prediction for a century hence. He was only a decade or so off with his forecast of a blogging/tweeting world. From the superb Paleo-Future.

No, it's not the World Cup, but the historic win in Bloemfontein will be good for the image of the game in its most underdeveloped market, and the victory will surely have positive knock on effects for ESPN as it seeks to establish itself in a sport and in a part of the world where Americans are scorned. ESPN Premier League will be available on every platform, including cable and satellite, and the company has signed a deal with Sky, which is expected to offer the new channel to the six million customers who subscribe to its sports package.

Next stop for ESPN? It has to be the Primera División of La Liga de Fútbol Profesional.

How did the woman who was Arianna Stassinopoulos go from right-wing columnist to liberal blogger to purveyor of foils by appointment to the White House? A very timely and acerbic piece in the New Republic exposes "the most upwardly mobile Greek since Icarus". First, the slideshow with the many faces of Arianna, and then the Puffington Host in all her gaudy plumage.

BTW, the love has really cooled between Ann Althouse and the guy she fell for in November.

For all those tyrants, from Cuba to Iran, from Venezuela to Zimbabwe, who find democracy so tedious, here's a snippet of recent British history showing how vital the woolsack is to the functioning of civil society.

That's Rik Mayall from The Comic Strip on the woolsack, by the way. Laughed and laughed and laughed. Especially at his references to "Mr Scoggle".

UPDATE: John Bercow, not Al Pacino, elected new Commons Speaker.