After the sun had set into the sea, it was a moonless clear night. Over the beach at midnight, looking out to sea from the cliffs, the Milky Way along with thousands of stars was clearly visible, a rare sight in Britain.

At night, I was thinking about how awful and traumatic the loss of even one child is and about the horror of war. The arguments against our intervention in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya are well rehearsed and don’t need to be repeated. Suffice it to say that deterrence was and can be made to work along with minimal proportionate response. I still think that most of the world’s problems over the last two-thousand years have been caused by governments not arranging their budgets and exerting a moral right to invade other people’s countries. I have been reading a biography of Eleanor of Aquitaine this week. A remarkable woman married first to the King of France, whom she divorces as too much of a wimp, then to the King of England. But I’m not sure a great deal has changed since then.