Moments of crisis dissolve our ordinary comforts and reveal our true nature. The Greek historian Thucydides documented how the 5th century BC plague of Athens led the Athenians to licentiousness and a hubristic disregard for all law. Pavlos Papadopoulos, writing in Law and Liberty, suggests that like the Athenians, we are forced by our own pandemic to confront our culture’s less savoury aspects.

In Vino Veritas – Or, Whatever It Takes to Get the Truth Out of Such a Crew
Winston Churchill drank his way to saving the world from Nazism and, according to Alec Marsh in Spiked, the old bulldog would fit right in with certain current Parliamentarians enjoying a tipple to endure late-night sittings in Westminster. “Well, why not?” Marsh asks. “Politicians wouldn’t be human if they didn’t.” This news doesn’t, however, sit well with certain neo-puritan scolds from – you guessed it – the Green Party, which on the other hand does support providing free narcotics to welfare recipients.


