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In the 1880s the lay anthropologist L.V. Helms, witnessing satya (suttee) in Bali, recorded several reactions. As young, white-clad widows stepped delicately to their fiery deaths on a funeral pyre, Helms (as the professional anthropologist Clifford Geertz points out) not only felt moral horror but was torn by his aesthetic appreciation of the dramatic beauty of the pageant and his awe at the power of ritual over life. It’s all in the eye of the beholder, the old adage says. And that is why politics and art have always had an uneasy relationship, although some would say they have none at all. Earlier this month in New York, the writers’ organisation PEN sponsored a panel with the expository title “Mind the Gap – writers eye the U.S.-European cultural divide”. The organisers had assembled a diverse lot of cosmopolitan writers – Tariq Ali, Ian Buruma, Jane Kramer, Bernard-Henri Levy, Peter Schneider, and Carles Torner to discuss a subject that is not easily definable: is it culture, literature, music, art? On that night it was none of these. Although one panelist admitted that they had been asked to speak about books, most bit off big chunks of world politics in their opening comments and chewed fiercely for two