It hs been reported that the German foreign minister has been visiting Kaliningrad, an increasingly isolated Russian enclave, to celebrate the bicentenary of the death of Immanuel Kant. This reminded me very much of Evelyn Waugh's short story "Scott-Kings's Modern Europe", in which an elderly schoolteacher finds himself helping politicians to open up Neustralia by celebrating the tercentenary of the death of Bellorius. Waugh notes that Bellorius had lived when Neustralia was "happy" as part of a German-speaking empire; modern Neustralia is "turbulent" and anxious to win western friends. There is even a shocking exposure of a well-organised but inhumane people-trafficking network from east to west. All this in 1946 !