The ongoing Ferguson crisis in America is really two stories rather than one. The first story is the straightforward mystery of what happened when Darren Wilson (‘the white cop’) killed Michael Brown (‘the black youth’). The second story, much loved by the British and American media, is ‘America’s Racial Divide’. The two stories are related, of course, but not in quite the way that links them in most reporting and commentary.

As the fighters of the Islamic State drive from village to captured village in their looted humvees, they criss-cross what in ancient times was a veritable womb of gods. For millennia, the Fertile Crescent teemed with a bewildering variety of cults and religions. Back in the 3rd Christian century, a philosopher by the name of Bardaisan was so overwhelmed by the sheer array of beliefs to be found in Mesopotamia that he invoked it to disprove the doctrines of astrology.

Anybody with an ounce of compassion would have been doffing caps in recent days to Frank Maloney — as, indeed, absolutely everybody with an ounce of compassion vigorously and noisily was. His announcement that he is undergoing a sex change has been met by plaudits from far and wide, notably from within the muscularly male world of boxing in which he made his name and from where his former client, Lennox Lewis, has led the cheerleading.

On our second night in Seville we got lost. We’d been to a flamenco concert, my first, a little way out from the centre. Eight musicians sat in a horseshoe on a plain stage. Deep plaintive wails of the campo pierced a surface of jangling guitars. Men in the crowd murmured ‘Olé’ to applaud moments of virtuosity. ‘Let’s go for a walk,’ I said as we walked out of the theatre. I was emboldened by the soulful music and wanted to see more of the town.