I AM NOT sure which member of the family bought one of those metallic stickers for fridge doors which said “In vino veritas’. I turned it over and wrote, instead, ‘Etiam sin vino, semper veritas’. The truth always, even without wine,

The view of human nature implied in that ‘in vino veritas’ is hardly a noble one. It assumes that it is normal to dissemble slyly and consciously. We have secrets, some of which are attempts to justify our self-interest of which we are slightly ashamed, some to avoid offending other people. It requires a bit of alcohol to loosen our tongues.

I prefer to believe at least in the principle of Kant's categorical imperative that one must always tell the truth, except when we are constrained to lie by wholly altruistic reasons. When a gunman appears at your door and is obviously threatening harm to a sworn enemy who has taken refuge in your house, you do not answer truthfully when he asks ‘Is X in your house?’

I cannot make the holier-than-thou claim that I live up to that Kantian imperative. For fear of seeming stiff-necked and un-neighbourly, I contribute to the corruption of Italian society by weakly agreeing when my neighbour the carpenter suggests that I pay him half in cash and only half against a receipt which will record his earnings and give him a tax liability. I do not need wine to make me willingly and worriedly confess that fact when I am having a discussion with friends about the morality of citizenship. But otherwise I join the conspiracy of silence about tax evasion.

The disparate essays in this book all partake of my capacity for indignation: indignation at perverse, self-interested, refusal to acknowledge some awkward but clearly ascertainable fact, indignation at the inhibitions of political correctness, which no longer are about sparing people's feelings, but simply about not rocking some disciplinary boat, indignation at the Manichean us-them mentality which prompts people to give the most reprehensible interpretation of the motive of people or nations classified as ‘them’ and to sanitize the motives of ‘us’.