In my old age I have become interested in reading obituaries of persons who have merited to be remembered in national newspapers for what they have done or said. A few days agoI was impressed by the following remarks that are so pertinentto today.

Sylvia Kedourie, 90 years old, a Sephardic Jew born in Baghdad, and an acknowledged authority on the Middle East was deeply saddened by the recent fate of Christians in Syria and Iraq, but she was not surprised. She recalled a grim dictum of the Baghdadi Jewish Community that “after Saturday comes Sunday”.

Peter Stein, 90 years old, regius professor of civil law at the University of Cambridge, and an authority on Roman law, in his most famous work, Roman Law in European History first published in 1999, observes that the institutions of European Community law are frequently described as forming the beginning of a new ius commune, the Roman law and canon law which formed the common law of much of Europe. But, he pointed out, that was adopted voluntarily because of its innate advantages, while the EU pattern is being imposed from above in the interests of uniformity.