That could, at a stretch, drag things out until next spring, and a British general election (though Gordon Brown can wait until June 2010 if he wants to).

ECONOMIST: European politics

He retells the terrible siege of Dien Bien Phu earlier that spring, when the North Vietnamese commander, Vo Ngu-yen Giap, made thousands of porters drag artillery into the hills surrounding a French base, from where they pounded the foreign army.

ECONOMIST: The first Vietnam war