FROM where on the ideological spectrum do you imagine the following sentence derives?
Ayaan Hirsi Ali has brains and beauty and is a gift to those of us who like our prejudices confirmed.

No, it's not some snarly ex-Trot sounding off on Spiked.com, or some male-chauvinist cleric putting Hirsi Ali in her place for daring to criticise Islamic dogma. It is, in fact, the impeccably liberal writer and publisher Hilary McPhee, writing in The Age in July. And McPhee goes further, describing Hirsi Ali as disturbing and delusional and more than implying that if she didn't exist, we in the West would have to invent her.