Douglas Murray: I’m only going to speak for about 15 minutes because I wanted as much time as possible for Q&A, because I sense that there hasn’t been much, so far, and because I’m always very excited about hearing other people’s views and questions.  But let me start by making a few remarks.

The first, by the way, is that I’ll talk a little about my recent book.  It’s always rather difficult to understand another country, let alone another continent, or another culture.  There are things you have in common.  There are things which seem bizarre, when you look at them from outside, and there are things that look recognizable.  There are things that rhyme.  There are an enormous number of similarities between where I’m from and where most of you are from, and an enormous number of differences too.  I’ve been in the states a week, spoken at a campus, and was on the West Coast at the beginning of the week, and I had one of those disassociation moments in San Francisco, when I had been in my second day in the city, and I just noticed that absolutely everywhere, there seemed to be posters advertising delivery services for marijuana.  And I thought this is interesting because if there’s one thing it seems to me that San Francisco doesn’t need it’s easier access to marijuana.  More of it, just so that people who smoke it don’t even have to go down the street.  But there are lots of similarities between our societies as well, and one of the, I suppose, most gratifying things since the “Strange Death of Europe” came out in June here in the U.S. is the number of people who have come over to me and written to me from America, from Canada, from Australia, and said this book is about us isn’t it?  And, perhaps I could stop by just saying a little about what it is about, and you’ll get some of the resonances.