My wife Jennifer drove us to the vet while I held him in my arms. He hated the vet. I always took him, when it was unavoidable, in a cat carrier, and he screamed all the way. Today I held him in my arms instead. He nestled there quietly, holding his head up to look out at a world he last saw almost twenty years ago. Jennifer told them what we wanted. I sat with him quietly, then they called us into one of the exam rooms, took his weight, just a little over seven pounds, to see how much of the drugs they would need. He screamed for the first time when they picked him up and took him into a back room, to insert a catheter into his right front leg. He was silent when they brought him back, thin, with his once beautiful fur an unkempt disordered tangle.

The death of actor Corin Redgrave April 6 produced an outpouring of rather airbrushed eulogies in the British media. Scion of the renowned Redgrave clan, major figures for four generations in British stage, screen, and later television, Corin had made his name in productions of Shakespeare and Noel Coward and appeared in such films as A Man for All Seasons, Excalibur, and Four Weddings and a Funeral. His father was the well-known film actor Michael Redgrave. His two sisters, of course, were Vannessa and Lynn Redgrave. Corin was a lifelong leftist, as is Vanessa. The British media on his death referred vaguely but positively to Corin's fight against injustice. BBC Radio 4 said Corin Redgrave had been "looking at all forms of injustice and oppression" and was "trying to make a better world". In fact Corin Redgrave with his better known sister Vanessa were decades-long members of the Workers Revolutionary Party, a Trotskyist sect run as a mad cult by Gerry Healy.

Observer columnist Nick Cohen takes the prettifiers to task in the April 29 London Standpoint:

One of the most disappointing trends in the past several decades has been the enthusiasm of many far left currents and organizations for Third World dictators, right-wing jihadi theocrats, and other such enemies of bearable human societies. I cannot help but recall that it was policies like this by the American government that in my youth drew me to the left in revulsion. The lodestone of this politics is a compass that always points to the United States as the preeminent evil in the world. Running a close second, however, is an obsessive hatred of Israel and by extension the great majority of the comparatively small number of Jews left on the planet, who are sympathetic to the Jewish state. To say this will immediately elicit the outcry, "You supporters of Israel just brand anybody who criticizes Israel as an anti-Semite to stifle any discussion of Israel's crimes."