hearing words that were destroying everything I had lived by. I had been honest in my previous faith, and I was equally honest in rejecting it I came to detest Stalin. From then on I devoted myself to searching out a way to put an end to this inhuman system.Thereafter, like many other senior Party members who would emerge as reformers in the late 1980s, he lived "a double life of agonising dissimulation".Sent to Prague in 1968 to supervise the Soviet press coverage of the Soviet army's invasion, and hearing the Czechs shouting "Fascists!" at the invaders was the third and final straw. We were talking about the world economy and I asked him about his greatest worry. I had expected the usual banker's concerns: something about the US deficit or maybe the rise in the oil price His answer was: "bird flu" It seemed incongruous. Up to then I had thought of bird flu, insofar as I had thought of it at all, as a potentially serious public health matter but one that would be within the normal range of other recent health worries, such as BSE. A month ago I was in a village high up in the Alps, chatting to the head of a Swiss bank.

Just because some people out there believe that everything gay people do is ethically wrong, we mustn't leap to the contrary conclusion that we have a right to do anything we choose.Self-gratification at the expense of reasonable opinion is the curse of the age. Jody Dobrowski wasn't doing anything so very drastically wrong; certainly not wrong enough to justify so horrible an end. But we might consider the possibility that these habits are not just recklessly foolish and dangerous, but just not a very good idea from any point of view More from Philip Hensher. If I had had children in tow, rather than a dog, I might have found a stronger word than "unacceptable". It isn't homophobic to object to it .The truth is that, because gay men are, undeniably, persecuted by some parts of society even when their behaviour is perfectly reasonable and, indeed, not sexual at all, they have hung on defensively to practices which ought to have been abandoned long ago.

Indeed, most of them have abandoned them, if my acquaintance is anything to go by. Anyone who responds to these things with violence or murder is clearly mad. But surely we can admit that they cause significant annoyance, at the very least, to the wider community, and not unreasonable annoyance, either. Once, taking a short cut across Clapham Common in the middle of the afternoon, I came across an entirely naked man masturbating for the delectation of a small audience That, frankly, is just unacceptable behaviour. But anyone who enjoys such things is welcome to them; if you don't like the idea of them, you don't even have to know about them.But group sex on Clapham Common, or in a public toilet, falls into rather a different category.