Fifteen years after communism was officially pronounced dead, its spectre seems once again to be haunting Europe. Last month, the Council of Europe’s parliamentary assembly voted to condemn the “crimes of totalitarian communist regimes,” linking them with Nazism and complaining that communist parties are still “legal and active in some countries.” Now Goran Lindblad, the conservative Swedish MP behind the resolution, wants to go further. Demands that European Ministers launch a continent-wide anti-communist campaign — including school textbook revisions, official memorial days, and museums — only narrowly missed the necessary two-thirds majority.

Mr. Lindblad pledged to bring the wider plans back to the Council of Europe in the coming months. He has chosen a good year for his ideological offensive: this is the 50th anniversary of Nikita Khrushchev’s denunciation of Josef Stalin and the subsequent Hungarian uprising, which will doubtless be the cue for further excoriation of the communist record. Paradoxically, given that there is no communist government left in Europe outside Moldova, the attacks have if anything, become more extreme as time has gone on. A clue as to why that might be can be found in the rambling report by Mr. Lindblad that led to the Council of Europe declaration. Blaming class struggle and public ownership, he explained “different elements of communist ideology such as equality or social justice still seduce many” and “a sort of nostalgia for communism is still alive.”

Perhaps the real problem for Mr. Lindblad and his right-wing allies in Eastern Europe is that communism is not dead enough — and they will only be content when they have driven a stake through its heart. The fashionable attempt to equate communism and Nazism is in reality a moral and historical nonsense. Despite the cruelties of the Stalin terror, there was no Soviet Treblinka or Sorbibor, no extermination camps built to murder millions. Nor did the Soviet Union launch the most devastating war in history at a cost of more than 50 million lives — in fact it played the decisive role in the defeat of the German war machine. Mr. Lindblad and the Council of Europe adopt as fact the wildest estimates of those “killed by communist regimes” (mostly in famines) from the fiercely contested Black Book of Communism, which also underplays the number of deaths attributable to Hitler. But, in any case, none of this explains why anyone might be nostalgic in former communist states, now enjoying the delights of capitalist restoration.

The dominant account gives no sense of how communist regimes renewed themselves after 1956 or why Western leaders feared they might overtake the capitalist world well into the 1960s. For all its brutalities and failures, communism in the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, and elsewhere delivered rapid industrialization, mass education, job security, and huge advances in social and gender equality. Its existence helped to drive up welfare standards in the West, and provided a powerful counterweight to Western global domination.

It would be easier to take the Council of Europe’s condemnation of communist state crimes seriously if it had also seen fit to denounce the far bloodier record of European colonialism — which only finally came to an end in the 1970s. This was a system of racist despotism, which dominated the globe in Stalin’s time. And while there is precious little connection between the ideas of fascism and communism, there is an intimate link between colonialism and Nazism. The terms lebensraum and konzentrationslager were both first used by the German colonial regime in South-West Africa (now Namibia), which committed genocide against the Herero and Nama peoples and bequeathed its ideas and personnel directly to the Nazi party. Around 10 million Congolese died as a result of Belgian forced labour and mass murder in the early twentieth century; tens of millions perished in avoidable or enforced famines in British-ruled India; up to a million Algerians died in their war for independence, while controversy now rages in France about a new law requiring teachers to put a positive spin on colonial history. Comparable atrocities were carried out by all European colonialists, but not a word of condemnation from the Council of Europe. Presumably, European lives count for more.

No major twentieth century political tradition is without blood on its hands, but battles over history are more about the future than the past. Part of the current enthusiasm in official Western circles for dancing on the grave of communism is no doubt about relations with today’s Russia and China. But it also reflects a determination to prove there is no alternative to the new global capitalist order — and that any attempt to find one is bound to lead to suffering. With the new imperialism now being resisted in the Muslim world and Latin America, growing international demands for social justice and ever greater doubts about whether the environmental crisis can be solved within the existing economic system, the pressure for alternatives will increase.

The first arrival on being introduced, asked me if I was the owner of the hotel. The second arrival shook my hand vigorously, then proclaimed. “Yes, of course, I’ve read your book—No full stops in India.”

“That was Mark Tully”, I said, “He smokes a pipe.”

The third or fourth arrival got it right, but spoilt it all by asking, “Do you still write, Mr. Bond?”

This is like asking a chef if he still makes soup, or a cobbler if he can repair a shoe. I couldn’t be bothered answering his question, but a little boy came to my rescue by asking me to sign my latest book. Nevertheless, the question lingers and sometimes I ask myself: Did I find my dream—the dream of 45 years ago? Do I remember that dream? Most of it, I do believe. To live independently as a fulltime writer, that was part of the dream. And I have done that for most of my adult life. No riches, no houses, no cars, no computers. But independence, certainly.

To live in the place of my choice. While I was away in Delhi in the early 1960s, I decided I was going to live in the hills and work from there. Just as, five years earlier, I had decided that my home was India and not England.

Mussoorie may not have been the perfect choice (there are places more lovely), but in many ways, it has suited me. I’m near the Doon (familiar territory), not too far from Delhi (and my publishers), and just a short walk into the solitude of the mountains. I have lived with the family and companions of my choice—Prem and his children and grandchildren, and many good people on the hillside who have been generous to me over the years.

And have I won the time for leisure, books, nature, love and friendship? Yes, most of these things, for some of the time. Not everything falls neatly into place. How can it? But I think I’ve done most of what I set out to do. I could have done it a little better, and perhaps there’s time to do more. My faults and limitations are many, but I’ve always accepted that I’m a most imperfect specimen of humanity, which means I’ve always been on friendly terms with myself! And yes, Sir, I’m still doing my thing—cobbling shoes, making a tolerable soup, and recording my life and the life around me to the best of my ability. Talking of hotels—most of them, big or small, have one thing in common: the occasional guest who makes off with the linen, the cutlery, and sometime, even a TV set.

Nandu (of the Savoy) tells of how one customer drove off with a mattress rolled up on the luggage rack. When the manager realized what had happened, he phoned the police at the toll-barrier, and they stopped the car and took possession of the mattress. The owner of the car promptly blamed his driver for the theft, but the driver responded— “Sir, you asked me to pick up two mattresses, and now you are blaming me for stealing one!”

Of course there are some tourists who leave their belongings behind; or if not their belongings, their fellow-travelers. The day after a group of jolly, beer-guzzling young men vacated their room, the housekeeper opened a cupboard to have a dead body tumble out on top of her. In a different hotel, a box-bed was found stuffed with a decaying corpse. Both cases went unsolved. Equally enterprising were the young men from Haryana who stabbed to death one of their companions and left the body in the Landour cemetery. But these gentlemen left so many clues behind that they were caught a few days later. Hill-stations are, by and large, peaceful places, but just occasionally, crime rears its ugly head and an old lady is found strangled in her bed or a failed businessman is found hanging in the bathroom. We won’t dwell on these tragedies but think instead of the thousands who come here in high spirits and go away in even better spirits—the combination of clean mountain air, breath-taking scenery, and, just occasionally, spirits of the bottled variety having done wonders for their outlook on life.

To me, flowers are the most sensual of living things, or perhaps, it’s just that the appeal to the sensuality of my own nature. A rose in bud, the heady scent of jasmine, the unfolding of a lily, the flaunting colour of dahlias and giant marigolds, the seductive fragrance of the honeysuckle, all these excite and entice me.

A wild species of geranium (the round-leaved cransebill, to give its English name) with a tiny lilac flower, has responded to my overtures, making a great display in a tub where I encouraged it to spread. Never one to spurn a gesture of friendship, I have given it the freedom of the shady back verandah. Let it be my flower of the month, this rainy August.

Caffeine, the stimulant in coffee, has been called “the most widely used psychoactive substance on Earth.”Synder, Daly and Bruns have recently proposed that caffeine affects behavior by countering the activity in the human brain of a naturally occurring chemical called adenosine. Adenosine normally depresses neuron firing in many areas of the brain. It apparently does this by inhibiting the release of neurotransmitters, chemicals that carry nerve impulses from one neuron to the next. Like many other agents that affect neuron firing, adenosine must first bind to specific receptors on neuronal membranes. There are at least two classes of these receptors, which have been designated A1 and A2.

Snyder et al propose that caffeine, which is structurally similar to adenosine, is able to bind to both types of receptors, which prevents adenosine from attaching there and allows the neurons to fire more readily than they otherwise would.

For many years, caffeine’s effects have been attributed to its inhibition of the production of phosphodiesterase, an enzyme that breaks down the chemical called cyclic AMP. A number of neurotransmitters exert their effects by first increasing cyclic AMP concentrations in target neurons. Therefore, prolonged periods at the elevated concentrations, as might be brought about by a phosphodiesterase inhibitor, could lead to a greater amount of neuron firing and, consequently, to behavioral stimulation. But Snyder et al point out that the caffeine concentrations needed to inhibit the production of phosphodiesterase in the brain are much higher than those that produce stimulation. Moreover, other compounds that block phosphodiesterase’s activity are not stimulants.

To buttress their case that caffeine acts instead by preventing adenosine binding, Snyder et al compared the stimulatory effects of a series of caffeine derivatives with their ability to dislodge adenosine from its receptors in the brains of mice. “In general,” they reported, “the ability of the compounds to compete at the receptors correlates with their ability to stimulate locomotion in the mouse; i.e., the higher their capacity to bind at the receptors, the higher their ability to stimulate locomotion.” Theophylline, a close structural relative of caffeine and the major stimulant in tea, was one of the most effective compounds in both regards. There were some apparent exceptions to the general correlation observed between adenosine-receptor binding and stimulation.One of these was a compound called 3-isobuty1-1-methylxanthine(IBMX), which bound very well but actually depressed mouse locomotion. Snyder et al suggest that this is not a major stumbling block to their hypothesis. The problem is that the compound has mixed effects in the brain, a not unusual occurrence with psychoactive drugs. Even caffeine, which is generally known only for its stimulatory effects, displays this property, depressing mouse locomotion at very low concentrations and stimulating it at higher ones.