So yesterday was Ash Wednesday, the launch of what the Catholic Church declares a period for abstinence, sacrifice and fasting. Today everyone eats bags of chocolates, dines in pricey restaurants, spends a fortune on flowers and f*cks like there’s no tomorrow in honour of another Church-devised icon. The pope has thus so rightfully quit his job. Who’s next?

In 2010 George Papaconstantinou, chief negotiator of Greece’s first bail-out by the EU and IMF, took delivery from the French government of a disk with the names of 2,000 Greeks with Swiss bank accounts. He kept it and deleted names of members of his family. The planned investigation was dropped.

There is a direct line between the attacks on September 11, 2001 — the most significant instance of blowback in the history of the CIA — and the events of 1979. In that year, revolutionaries threw both the Shah and the Americans out of Iran, and the CIA, with full presidential authority, began its largest ever clandestine operation: the secret arming of Afghan freedom fighters to wage a proxy war against the Soviet Union, which involved the recruitment and training of militants from all over the Islamic world. Steve Coll’s book is a classic study of blowback and is a better, fuller reconstruction of this history than the Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States (the “9/11 Commission Report” published by Norton in July).