Jomier and Theo had rooms on the same staircase in their first year at Oxford. They had exchanged visits. Jomier had served cheap wine, Theo sherry out of a decanter. They had argued about religion. They still argue about religion. The position of neither has changed. Theo would like to convert Jomier and Jomier to convert Theo. But convert him to what? Jomier is aware that his agnosticism is a spongy alternative to Theo’s clear-cut Christian beliefs; but he feels he is in tune with the zeitgeist whereas Theo is not. He watches Theo eat liver and bacon in the dining room of the Athenaeum and tries to judge what in his friend is genuine conviction and what pose. Is Theo’s medieval morality adopted to match his fogeyish attire? Is Theo a reincarnation of G. K. Chesterton? Or Hilaire Belloc? Theo admires both writers though he is embarrassed by some of the things Belloc said about the Jews. Jomier tells Theo that his views are anachronistic; Theo retorts, quoting Chesterton, that the great advantage of Catholicism is that it saves a man from being a child of his time. He reminds Jomier of their contemporaries at Oxford who were Existentialists, Logical Positivists, Deconstructionists, Marxists, Maoists, Marcusards, Laingites, Reichians, Deridans and quotes St Paul: ‘The more they called themselves philosophers, the more stupid they grew.’ Jomier thinks back to the philosophical fashions that have come and gone in his lifetime and finds it hard to disagree.

Jomier has never felt the need of a philosophy – least of all a philosophy of life. He is, after all, a lawyer and there are now no principles behind the law beyond Rabelais’ ‘Fay ce que vouldras’ – ‘Do as you please so long as what you do doesn’t prevent me from doing what I please’. Theo would like our laws to be based upon Christian principles as they were in the Middle Ages. He tells Jomier that the rot started with the Enlightenment – with Voltaire, Hume, Rousseau and co. – and spread slowly but inexorably via Marx and Freud and Bertrand Russell and H. G. Wells to a point in the 1960s when finally the whole tree was rotten and came crashing down.

Jomier disagrees. There has always been a consistent principle behind the law – the interests of the legislators which by and large matched those of the rich. Nabobs were ennobled. Poachers were hanged. Adultery does more harm to society than poaching or shoplifting but when it became a favoured pastime of the powerful it ceased to be a crime.