There’s the inconvenience of the five-mile steel fence that has been erected around the premises to keep out protesters and Sir Bob Geldof’s million marchers, but we’re assured that it has been specially designed to “blend in” with the surrounding Perthshire countryside.
Tourism bosses claim to be thrilled with the G8’s choice of Scotland as their venue, claiming it will bring in millions of pounds of extra revenue – but I doubt the benefits will be that great. And so, at the G8 meeting, an event that needs to send all the right messages about corruption and good governance to African leaders, prime ministers and presidents will be waited on hand and foot, with the added perk of a championship golf course just outside. I doubt Italy’s Mr Fixit breakfasts from Tupperware in his waterside palace with its own secret tunnel and helipad or that Mrs Bush would tolerate a simple one-bar electric fire in her palatial private quarters at the White House. Do you find it as ironic as I do that our leaders at the G8 summit next month will be discussing world poverty and debt at one of Britain’s most luxurious hotels? Can someone explain to me the gradual process whereby ordinary politicians have gradually assumed all the trappings of European royalty? In the case of our Royal Family, the secret snaps taken by the tabloid reporter who posed as a footman revealed that HRH lives a private life far humbler than that of Tony, Dubya or Silvio. There’s the inconvenience of the

Do you find it as ironic as I do that our leaders at the G8 summit next month will be discussing world poverty and debt at one of Britain’s most luxurious hotels? Can someone explain to me the gradual process whereby ordinary politicians have gradually assumed all the trappings of European royalty? In the case of our Royal Family, the secret snaps taken by the tabloid reporter who posed as a footman revealed that HRH lives a private life far humbler than that of Tony, Dubya or Silvio.

I like Peter, who is one of the kindest men I know, but just reading the edited version that appeared in The Guardian made me feel as though I was eavesdropping on a conversation that should have taken place behind closed doors. In reality, they are just as prone to poisonous feuds and rivalries as anyone else, and conduct them as viciously, but under the cloak of politics or literature.So why did the Hitchens brothers do it? Perhaps the answer lies in Peter’s remark that Christopher should have been willing to debate with him long before now “and then we would have reached this position much earlier”. I’ve no idea what the audience made of it, but some of them must have realised they were watching an upmarket version of Big Brother
More from Joan Smith. (I don’t suppose many of Springer’s participants have got into a state of no-speakers after discussing the 1936 constitution of the Soviet Union.)Maybe there isn’t a good reason why intellectuals should be excused from taking part in the dominant discourse of our time, although I would have thought they were even less well equipped to handle it than the blue-collar participants in daytime TV shows. There seemed to be an underlying assumption that it’s odd for two members of the same family to hold opposing political views, which makes sense only if you take the naive view that everyone’s politics are genetically determined. Intellectual men, in my experience, are not renowned for being in touch with their feelings, encouraging each other in the illusion that they inhabit a world of pure reason.

Has everyone forgotten the existence of the unconscious?In this instance, The Guardian only just stopped short of introducing the Hitchens debate with a Springer headline along the lines of “I haven’t spoken to my brother for four years”. The clue that it wasn’t a trash-TV debate lay in the revelation that the ostensible cause of their falling out was a joke about Stalinism. Freud expected his patients to reveal their innermost feelings in confidence and it’s not as if he took their revelations at face value – that’s why it’s called psychoanalysis, for God’s sake. Anyone who can ask “how formative an experience was that?” deserves a response that readers of this newspaper would not, I’m sure, like to contemplate over Sunday breakfast.The domain of confessional culture is emotion, in a debased on-the-couch kind of way, and the premise is that it’s better to let it all out, whatever it happens to be.