Aspects of life here civility, courtesy, coziness have always bound Britons to their country . . . They are part of the British myth, along with lovely countryside, dogs and horses, rose gardens, the Armada, the Battle of Britain.

Maimed but still magnificent... Europe's mightiest medieval cathedral.

Success in war underpins the claims to greatness of many presidents.

Could Afghanistan become another Vietnam? Is the United States facing another stalemate on the other side of the world? Premature the questions may be, three weeks after the fighting began. Unreasonable they are not, given the scars scoured into the national psyche by defeat in Southeast Asia. For all the differences between the two conflicts, and there are many, echoes of Vietnam are unavoidable.

Mr. Reagan spent World War II, the global conflict fought and won by his generation, making training films in Hollywood.

The sense of national catastrophe is inevitably heightened in a television age, when the whole country participates in it.

Some of our best journalists take themselves even more seriously than the politicians they write about.