Eva Green’s progression from Bond girl to veteran spy is probably unique among beauties who have previous on the long-running film franchise. She has a very curious cut-glass voice, suggesting exoticism (to go with her overt eroticism), but it is a little distracting and she has not yet captured for me the easy-going naturalism she possessed in 2006’s Casino Royale. That said, in Spooks she is in a superior drama and is certainly a better showcase for her considerable talents than the largely disappointing and frustrating Camelot. I look forward to seeing her screen yumminess in future episodes whilst knowing that at any time her character might be bumped off by the screenwriters.

On other observations, I saw a one-legged pigeon (talon missing, with a stump above what would be the knee) showing that he was just as passionate about a female pigeon as a two-footed male rival and prepared to mix it up to indulge in carnality with her. Also, our cat, about to lick his hind leg paw, suddenly yawned, giving the impression that he was being very good-mannered in covering his mouth.

How the might have fallen? People may be talking about the ‘return’ of English-based teams to sporting prominence in the Champions League after a dip of two years (if a representative in last year’s final can be construed as decline). But what shocks me is that while Spain and England monopolise the 10/1 or better odds of winning the European Cup, august other contenders are left gasping with the dust in their face, if the bookmakers are to be believed. Of course, the minnows from such corners of Europe as Cyprus and Belarus will be group stage fodder for the larger teams but the comparative ignominy reserved for previous winners is startling. Triumphant as recently as 2010, Internazionale are no more than 25/1 on to repeat the trick, the same as their city rivals AC Milan. Bayern Munich, defeated by Inter in that final are little better off at 20/1 to revive memories of 2001. Porto are struggling at 33/1, Benfica at 100/1, Marseille (but does that qualify) at 150/1 and poor old Ajax, four-times winners, most recently with a great side in 1994, are languishing at 200/1. That last stat regarding Dutch football is the most startling of all.

Who's the boss?

Bosses, I’ve been told, derive from ancient Babylonia and the Levant, where each city had a local deity represented by a rock or carved object e.g. Babylon had Marduk. The Punic city of Sidon had Baal and this caused great consternation in the Kingdom of Israel when its monarch Ahab took Jezebel for a wife and to please her, introduced Baal worship. This was an abomination unto the Lord and thus Baal was more reviled as a name than any other. From this incident, descending millennia, through the corruption of colloquialism, the Western world has gradually turned Baal to boss. Hence, the frequent resentment of bosses has historical antecedents and is not simply the product of the modern workplace.
Horrible Bosses taps into the desire to hit back at your manager without any untoward consequences (such as losing your job). When first-person shooter ‘Doom’ was all the rage in the 1990s, computer-literate gamers were said to insert photos of their bosses onto the monsters they were destroying in a variety of ways. This film also riffs on the Hitchock thriller Strangers on a Train, as well as, pleasingly, the Danny DeVito/Billy Crystal vehicle Throw Momma from the Train. Our three put-upon ‘heroes’, played by Jason Bateman, Jason Sudeikis and Charlie Day, find their office superiors so intolerable they decide to murder them but at one turn removed so each has an alibi while the other is doing the wet work.
An intriguing twist is that the bosses are played by actors incomparably more famous (maybe as it should be given the vertical relationship) than those playing their underlings. To say that Jennifer Anniston’s sex pest character was drawn from her own experiences would be libellous – less so, Colin Farrell’s dissolute coke fiend. Kevin Spacey ahs trod this ground before as he reprises his Swimming with Sharks tour de force. It’s good to see Anniston, Farrell and Spacey in a decent film, as their Hollywood acting careers have gone underground, if not into hibernation.
On the flip side, Bateman, Sudeikis and Day do things that are so inconceivably stupid, that you feel they deserve some of their misery. Day’s character is the touched cousin of Zach Galifianakis’ Alan from The Hangover. Unfortunately, their farce stretches the bounds of credibility, taking you out of the plot and back into the cinema seat, as there is only so long one can teeter on the edge of reality if surrealist is not the goal. Jamie Foxx is the one who truly masters the absurdity of his persona’s actions as real life can be ridiculous too. This movie also has subtle comedy to its merit as well, such as saving it's one 12A-mandated f-word to the very end to give a satisfying pay-off to one of the situations or proving that Indian call centres can provide a very valuable service. The head-slapping disbelief regarding some moments deters one from a return viewing but it does a fine job for the time it is running. Three out of five.

With all the retrospectives on the upcoming tenth anniversary of September 11th (the aptly, if maybe a tad militarily, monikered 9/11, given the role of the emergency services in trying to save people), I find this piece by Gary Younge, utterly convincing. Lunatics did not just take over the asylum - misdirected public anger gave them the keys to the armoury.
Can the United States move beyond the narcissism of 9/11?

The unity brought about by the tragedy was intense but fleeting. The war on terror has been disastrous abroad and divisive at home.
In the immediate aftermath of the September 11 attacks the then national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, called in her senior staff and asked them to think seriously about "how [to] capitalise on these opportunities". The primary opportunity came from a public united in anger, grief and fear which the Bush administration sought to leverage to maximum political effect. "I think September 11 was one of those great earthquakes that clarify and sharpen," Rice told the New Yorker six months afterwards. "Events are in much sharper relief."
Ten years later the US response to the terror attacks have clarified three things: the limits to what its enormous military power can achieve, its relative geopolitical decline and the intensity of its polarised political culture. It proved itself incapable of winning the wars it chose to fight and incapable of paying for them and incapable of coming to any consensus as to why. The combination of domestic repression at home and military aggression abroad kept no one safe, and endangered the lives of many. The execution of Osama bin Laden provoked such joy in part because almost every other American response to 9/11 is regarded as a partial or total failure.
Inevitably, the unity brought about by the tragedy of 9/11 proved as intense as it was fleeting. The rally around the flag was a genuine, impulsive reaction to events in a nation where patriotism is not an optional addendum to the political culture but an essential, central component of it. Having been attacked as a nation, people logically felt the need to identify as a nation.
But beyond mourning of the immediate victims' friends and families, there was an element of narcissism to this national grief that would play out in policy and remains evident in the tone of many of today's retrospectives. The problem, for some, was not that such a tragedy had happened but that it could have happened in America and to Americans. The ability to empathise with others who had suffered similar tragedies and the desire to prevent further such suffering proved elusive when set against the need to avenge the attacks. It was as though Americans were unique in their ability to feel pain and the deaths of civilians of other nations were worth less.
It's a narcissism best exemplified by former vice-president Dick Cheney's answer when asked just last week on what grounds he would object to Iran waterboarding Americans when he maintained his support for America's right to use waterboarding. "We have obligations towards our citizens," he said. "And we do everything to protect our citizens."
However perverse that seems now such views had great currency at the moment, following the attacks, when many of the mistakes that would shape US foreign policy for the next 10 years were made. Terrorism will do that. "Terror is first of all the terror of the next attack," writes Arjun Appadurai in Fear of Small Numbers. If nothing else the Bush administration had fear on its side. "The next time the smoking gun could be a mushroom cloud," said Rice. "They only have to be right once. We have to be right every time."
The trouble is they got very little right. Broad sweeps of people from predominantly Muslim countries resulted in the "preventive detention" of 1,200 people; voluntary interviews of 19,000; and a program of special registration for more than 82,000 – but not a single terrorism conviction. A decade on the US ability to crush al-Qaida still depends almost entirely on its ability to negotiate with Pakistan and doing a deal with the Taliban in Afghanistan, where last month there was the highest US military death toll since the war began. And that's before we get to Iraq.
An effective response to 9/11 that would have truly satisfied the American public in that moment probably did not exist. A combination of diplomatic pressure, targeted intelligence-led operations and a more enlightened foreign policy was what would have been and has proved to be most successful. But following the attacks, when declarative sentences were the only ones heard and those who urged caution and restraint were compared to Neville Chamberlain, something more urgent, punitive and impressive was insisted upon.
Even now, the case against bombing Afghanistan is often met with the question: "So should we have done nothing?" As though anything short of a military response does not qualify as a response at all, and as if doing something that did not work and left untold innocents dead is better than doing something that would have been more effective but less dramatic.
Dissent to this logic in the US was initially was just that: dissent – minority views dismissed, ridiculed or even vilified by the mainstream. Shortly after the attacks ABC news anchor Ted Koppel introduced Arundhati Roy, Indian novelist and opponent of the Afghanistan war, thus: "Some of you, many of you, are not going to like what you hear tonight. You don't have to listen. But if you do, you should know that dissent sometimes comes in strange packages …"
But as time went on the number of dissenters started swelling. The most important single factor that shapes American attitudes to any war is whether they think they will win, explains Christopher Gelpi, professor of political science at Duke University who specialises in public attitudes to foreign policy. As the Iraq war floundered unity gave way to the acrimony, mistrust and mutual recrimination that characterises US politics today.
The response to 9/11 did not create these divisions – a year before the attacks the presidential election was decided by the courts – but it deepened, broadened, sustained and framed them for more than half a decade before the economic collapse. It was the central issue in the 2004 election and cast the 2008 election in terms of hope – Obama – against fear, McCain and Palin. Internationally Obama's victory marked the country's belated, more nuanced, more enlightened response to 9/11, signalling America's readiness to meaningfully re-engage with the rest of the world and the treaties that govern it.
Sadly that change in tone, style and to some extent substance has also proved inadequate. True, Obama killed Bin Laden, and his administration plans to draw down troops in Iraq and Afghanistan and has retired the phrase "war on terror". But they have maintained many of the most problematic elements of that war, including Guantánamo Bay, extraordinary rendition and military commissions, while intensifying the war in Afghanistan.
Meanwhile on the right, the hubris displayed by Rice that America could simply bend the world to its will and whim has since given way to denial and occasional bouts of impotent rage. Islamaphobia is on the rise, Muslim has become a slur and Iraq, apparently, was a success.
In 2004 a Bush aide (widely believed to be Karl Rove) chided a New York Times journalist for working in the "reality-based community", meaning people who "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality … That's not the way the world really works anymore. We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality – judiciously, as you will – we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors … and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."
But that's never been how the world works. And over the last 10 years reality has caught up with the rhetoric.

Alistair Darling, the ‘safe pair of hands’, Mr Management personified, has allowed a leak of his forthcoming memoir (that might survive longer than most before being remaindered) that “My worry is that they [the bankers] were so arrogant and stupid they might bring us all down.” Sir Fred Goodwin (acted like he was “off to play a game of golf”), Andy Hornby (“looking like he was about to explode”) et al could not take in how monumentally incompetent they were – Masters of the Universe being sucked down a black hole – and it was left to the taxpayer to pick up the pieces. Though the memoir is being published next week, it is more than about drumming up some publicity, it is politically strategic.
This week has heard that elements of the Coalition Government are voicing concerns (no doubt passed on through their financier friends) that banking reform should be delayed. I would be surprised if Darling wasn’t fuming as he heard Angela Knight, chief executive of the British Bankers’ Association and public face of the collective insist that banking reform must be postponed. She may have argued that the economic fundamentals were weak but she has the shameless chutzpah to sound as if bankers were some downtrodden underclass. There is not a hint of sincerity, a scintilla of apology, that the precise reason the economic fundamentals are weak are because of the tsunami of financial carnage unleashed by idiots promoted far beyond their competence (and initially abetted by politicians dazzled by the high-rolling lifestyle). In fact, this is exactly the best time to separate the retail and ‘casino’ arms of the banking giants because the global economy cannot take another banking shock. There has been a failure of nerve in Washington D.C. as Tim Geithner is Wall Street’s bitch and is trying to use Clinton-era medicine for completely changed circumstances. However, Germany and France have the banks in their sights (admittedly, not completely for altruistic reasons) and now is the time for a pan-European initiative. Osborne or Knight can’t claim that Britain will risk ruin if it acts alone because it will be in the protective blanket of the biggest economic zone in the world, of the EU.