So some evil opportunists have taken Alistair Cooke's bones and sold them off.

It's an unforgivable desecration ... though if it were someone else Cooke would perhaps have noted some amazing historical coincidence, made some astonishing analogy, and used the event to illustrate a wider point.

Cooke, who died in 2004, was both modern and old-fashioned. While keeping up with the world went with his trade, his understanding and analysis came from the long view. His genius (apart from catholic interests and an incredible memory) was melding the general and the particular and explaining it in plain English. And he lived so long and had easy access to the great and powerful. He heard Hitler speak in Munich in 1931, for goodness' sake.

Because his viewpoint was rooted in the past it also meant that Cooke made, very, very occasionally, a lapse of judgement, often along the lines of taste, his courtly attitudes to women usually to blame. He once made a comment about being able to cure a pompous person being about as impossible as reflowering a virgin. When he was told the latter was medically possible, he repeated the whole exchange in a speech in San Francisco. He had a sometimes prickly relationship with his longtime employers, the BBC (great bio here), partly because of the odd ill-advised statement he made in one of his weekly Letters.

But he was almost always on the money, as those who know their history are. On administration hawks without experience of war he said:

"Although in a democracy we keep to the famous and sensible belief that war is too important to be left to the generals, I have seen enough of civilians running policy in wartime to know that nobody is more bloodthirsty, more exhilarated by the war game, than Presidential assistants who are new to it. They give force to a warning maxim I have quoted before and will quote again: CE Montague's celebrated line, 'Hell hath no fury like a non-combatant scorned.'”