The best people all hated Wellington. Byron mocked him, in a French accent, as "Villainton". Goya painted him a a pop-eyed hysteric.

If I'd been around at the time I'd have hated him too. A professional military man and (inefficient) Tory Prime Minister- what's not to dislike?

I own a portrait of Wellington. It's a 19th century print my mother picked up at a house sale for 'arf a crown in the late 50s. I've been carrying it around with me and hanging it on walls ever since.

The English prefer their heroes to die at the moment of victory, like Wolfe or Nelson. Wellington, disobligingly, lived on and on.

Tennyson's Ode on the Funeral of the Duke of Wellington is a monument to technical virtuosity and incredibly boring.

"Let us bury the great Duke with a sound of lamentation.
Let us bury the great Duke with the sound of the mourning of a mighty nation."

I'm dropping off already- and it goes on like that for pages and pages. I've never yet managed to read to the end.

It's a Times leader wrenched into verse.

In Sergei Bondarchuk's Waterloo, while Rod Steiger's Napoleon is wrestling with his bowels and sweating horribly and failing to eat a hearty breakast, Christopher Plummer's Wellington is taking a nap under a tree with the Times spread over his face.

That's the essence of Wellington: he was incredibly cool- in every sense of the word.

He didn't care about personal popularity either. The self belief was awesome.

When a celebrity girlfriend threatened to name him in her kiss and tell memoirs unless he stumped up a large sum of money his response (which has passed into the language) was "publish and be damned."

He was very quotable. And quotable not merely because he was witty. He had absolutely no time for cant.

For instance:

"People talk of their enlisting from their fine military feeling- all stuff - no such thing. Some of our men enlist from having got bastard children- some for minor offences- many more for drink."

And here's my favourite:

"Nothing except a battle lost can be half as melancholy as a battle won."

Whatever happened to the misers?

Back in the 18th and 19th centuries people loved their misers. There was a whole literature about them. They were mean, they stank, they hid guineas in dung-heaps, they made pies out of long dead sheep. Mr Boffin in Our Mutual Friend is an avid collector and consumer of miser-porn. Daniel Dancer, John Elwes, Vulture Hopkins- these guys were famous.

There were famous fictional misers too- Scrooge, Silas Marner, Uncle Ebenezer Balfour.

But then along came the 20th century and misers- both real and fictional- dropped out of sight.

So why don't we have them any more?

I'm between two fires. There's death metal pounding out of Joe's bedroom and Mozart wafting up from downstairs, where Ailz is watching a DVD of Don Giovanni.

Don Giovanni is the first text in the first unit of her Open University course. The other texts are short pieces by Hume, Rousseau and de Sade.

I read the Rousseau and de Sade yesterday. Rousseau is a soppy date. Sade is much more bracing. Amusing too.

The de Sade isn't one of his sexual marathons but a cute little piece in which a dying man persuades his confessor to embrace the libertine life-style. At the end, after he has won the priest round to his way of thinking, the dying man announces, "Six women more beautiful than sunlight are in the room adjoining. I was keeping them all for this moment. Take your share of them and, pillowed on their bosoms, try to forget, as I do, the vain sophisms of superstition and the stupid errors of hypocrisy."

(Don't you just love that idea of saving up women for a special occasion? I wonder what they were doing out there in the ante-room- reading lifestyle magazines?)

The death metal has stopped and Joe has left the building. Donna Anna has the field to herself.

I took my new found knowledge to the tutorial this morning, but found I didn't need it. Instead of looking at the texts, our tutor decided we'd have fun with syllogisms. "All dogs have four legs. This table has four legs. Therefore this table is a dog." That kind of thing. I guess the idea was to get us thinking like philosophes.

Then, when we'd finished with syllogisms, we looked at pictures of Napoleon. He's unit 2. Apparently Napoleon crossed the Alps on a mule- which the painter David turned into an Arab stallion. If it had really been a stallion and it had really reared up on its hindlegs as David has it doing, Napoleon (who was a poor rider) would have fallen off into a crevasse.

I was watching the BBC's end of year arts review and Mark Lawson pointed out that all the art he and his team were looking at- books, films, plays, exhibitions- was in some way, directly or tangentially, about Bush.

We are living in the Era of Bush. The Age of Bush. The Bush Era. That is what the historians will call it.

Oh....

So now the BBC is giving us a history of the War on Terror. It begins in 1945- with a guy called Strauss who was the guru of the neo-cons and a guy called Qutub who decided that the Islamic nations needed to be rescued from the corruption of Truman's America.

Strauss and Qutub were ideological twins- puritans, at war with the liberal individualism. Strauss reckoned that a nation could only save its soul if it rallied to church and flag- and it could only be trusted to do that if it had an ENEMY.

The Soviet Empire was a dandy enemy. When it collapsed (having proved itself a lot less dandy than the neo-cons argued) a new Enemy had to be found. And there was Bin Laden just raring to step into Brezhnev's shoes.

The story of the past half century is the story of a struggle between liberalism and puritanism. Everything else- however epic- has been a distraction- a sleight of hand designed to take our gaze away from what was really going on.

We talk as though the decades of the 20th century were separate entities. The Fifties were guilty of that. The Seventies were good because of this. There was a TV show I watched last night called I Hate The Sixties. It involved a shower of right-wing ideologues sounding off about Enoch Powell and tower blocks and promiscuity and radical theology and the pill as though these disparate phenomena were all the work of some evil genie called the Sixties who had come out of nowhere and imposed his will upon a hitherto right-thinking nation.

Where's historical progression in all of this?

The Sixties- it's a meaningless idea. It's a arbitrarily designated stretch of time in which all sorts of different things happened. Bad things, good things. Of course what everyone means by the Sixties is Mick Jagger and Mary Quant smoking dope on the King's Road with flowers in their hair. It's an ethos, it's a dandyism, it's a whiff of patchouli. Flimsy, fatuous and fun. But the drive of the programme was to suggest that Jagger and Quant were somehow personally responsible for racial ugliness in Wolverhampton and the mistakes of the town planners. A butterfly flapped its wings in Chelsea and Dr Beeching axed the rural branch lines.

What the rightists really hate is the ending of hierarchy and authority and deference. The words reality and illusion got bandied about a lot. The old ways = reality, the spirit of the Sixties = illusion. Ah, get with it boys. Life's an illusion. There are better dreams and there are worse dreams.

Love, freedom, flowers in the hair- it's as good a dream as any.