There are two kinds of truth about Jesus Christ. The first is the Gospel truth. Its veracity is vouchsafed by faith. In the believer’s eyes no contradictions do, or even can, exist in the divinely inspired Gospels. Appearances to the contrary should be ignored or reconciled.

For instance, the Gospel of John gives a historically acceptable account of the condemnation of Jesus: he was arrested a day before Passover and, without the mention of a Passover meal and a formal Jewish court process, he was brought before Pilate, accused of being a revolutionary and sentenced to crucifixion.

The death of Alexander Solzhenitsyn finds the world, not for the first time, faced with a need to understand him, and to understand Russia. His life since his release from jail was devoted to powerful writing about the horrors of Stalinism – and also about its stupidities and its nastiness.

One forgets how little was really known about the Soviet Union until 1956 and Khrushchev’s Secret Speech, and that dealt mainly with the fate of Stalin’s political opponents. In Russia, the truth had been suppressed. In the West, it had been doubted. The publication, in 1963, of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich broke the dam. From then on Solzhenitsyn continued his fight, throwing down the challenge in his other well-known works. Luckily his new world fame prevented the USSR from using its earlier method of coping with such rebels: death or slavery.

I once sat next to Max Mosley at a lunch at a time when he was more famous as the face of motor racing than as the bottom in the News of the World. The lunch was hosted by David Mellor (no stranger later to tabloid scandal – “From Toe Job to No Job”), who was then Arts Minister under Margaret Thatcher, before he graduated to the Treasury under John Major.

Mellor dilated at length about the Royal Opera House – the pros and cons, but mainly the cons – in the context of describing the virtues of subsidising cultural activities. Mosley couldn’t be persuaded that any subsidy to culture was justified but if the government was rash enough to subsidise culture, why not motor racing, was that not culture? While it was pointed out that there was no more heavily subsidised (by the manufacturers) activity on earth than motor racing, no one at the lunch chose to answer his question: what do you understand by the word “culture”?

Shortly before the anniversary of the great Western credit crunch, I paid a visit to its antithesis: the great Eastern savings splurge. Nowhere better embodies the breakneck economic expansion of China than the city of Chongqing. Far up the River Yangtze, it is the fastest growing city in the world today. I had seen some spectacular feats of construction in previous visits to China, but this put even Shanghai and Shenzhen into the shade. There was something truly awe-inspiring about the countless tower blocks under construction, the innumerable cranes perched on the city’s hills, the gleaming new highways, the brand-new enterprise zones, the ubiquitous smog. I felt I was witnessing an industrial revolution several orders of magnitude larger than the Industrial Revolution that once filled the cities of the West – of the British Isles and North America – with similar noxious fumes.

The music coming from the mobile phones further up the carriage was loud and tinny. It was the middle of the day and the train, creaking and groaning on its way from south-east London to Charing Cross, was only a third full. I managed about three stations before walking the few steps to where they sat: two very tough-­looking girls in their late teens. The adrenalin pumped.

“Excuse me, but would you mind turning it down just a bit, please?” I asked with the most ingratiating smile I could muster. They carried on, seemingly oblivious. I tried again, and then again. Finally they looked up, shocked, and then, almost immediately, angry. “Not doin’ you any harm!” one of them blurted at me. “What’s it to do with you? No one else has said nothing. Oi, mister” – she got the attention of a young guy sitting a few seats away – “we ain’t bothering you are we? You don’t mind, do yer?”

The Fifth French Republic, the creation of General de Gaulle, is 50 years old. Of the many regimes since the Revolution of 1789 only the Third Republic (1871–1940) enjoyed a longer life. Nicolas Sarkozy is its sixth President, only four years older than the Republic itself, the first of its leaders to be free of the divisive wartime memories and the crisis that led to the collapse of the Fourth Republic and gave birth to the Fifth. This freedom represents Sarkozy’s opportunity.

The Fifth Republic was born in anxiety and fear. De Gaulle was recalled to power as “the most illustrious of Frenchmen” because the Fourth Republic (1946–58) – the “regime of the parties” – was on the point of collapse, threatened by insurrection in Algeria and the prospect of a military coup.