BBC Panorama sent me to the crash site [of MH17]. The Kremlin was furiously denying any involvement and its fog machine was working full-time. They w… - John Sweeney

To understand the extraordinary fact of Ceausescu's monolithic power, and the otherwise incomprehensible lack of resistance to it, one must try to experience the sheer dead weight the Romanians bore day in, day out. During the twenty-four years of his reign, their thoughts were blunted and restricted by what George Orwell might have called 'Homagespeak'.

By common consent Ceausescu went mad during his and Elena's trip to China and North Korea in 1971. He went out an unstable paranoiac; he came back a madman. People close to him debate which had the more pernicious influence, China or North Korea. Terrible as Mao's China was as it emerged from the throes of the Cultural Revolution, North Korea was then and still is the more totalitarian society, and enjoys the distinction of being the most pyramidal society on earth.

Some idiot is moving heavy furniture around in the flat above and I wake up with a start. I'm about to give Lambeth Council a ring to get them to sort him out when I remember I am in Kyiv and it's four o'clock in the morning, and it's not tables and chairs that are going bang but Russian artillery.
The idiot is Vladimir Putin and his idiot war is two days old.