Never can there have been such an age as this for political trials, investigations and interrogations; not even in the high tide of the inquisition.

As so often happens, an imaginative writer, Kafka, foresaw what was going to happen and in his novel “The Trial” produced a sort of prototype in which the accused has no notion what he is charged with or who his judges are. He only knows that he is guilty.

I once thought of a series of plays performed in the same symbolic set of a court, using the transcripts of all the famous trials of our time – The Moscow Trials of the Old bolsheviks, the Reichstag Fire Trial, the Riom Trials of Blum and the other leaders of the French Third Republic, and then, under de Gaulle, the corresponding trials of Petain and Laval; the Nuremberg Trials and of course Joseph McCarthy-inspired charges, counter-charges and investigations under the auspices of the Senate Permanent Sub-Committee on Investigations.

If my theories were done correctly, it would surely emerge that all the these trials were concerned with one thing – loyalty; and that all of them ended indecisively because it is impossible to discover who or what, in the twentieth century, we are supposed to be loyal to.