"There is a myth, according to which Hebrew was revived for ideological reasons by a genius of a madman, or a madman of a genius, called Eliezer Ben Yehuda, who reinvented Hebrew and invented thousands of words — and all of it is true," Oz said.
"The ideological sting, the madness, the beauty, the improvisational genius of it has all been taken away," he rumbled.
Like Lady Thatcher, Mr Blair's political genius lies in having reached across familiar ideological boundaries to the core constituency of his opponents.
Unlike other geniuses such as Picasso (who loathed Gaudí for ideological reasons but was indebted to his art) or Mozart, Gaudí never burned out.
This combination of conservatism and radicalism, of political sleepiness and insomnia, this centuries-long brotherhood of gamekeeper and poacher, which Orwell called "the English genius," was also Orwell's genius, finding in English life its own ideological brotherhood.
On the one hand, it mistrusted the cosmopolitan, urban and ideological tendencies of Modernism, yet it provided a safe haven for its presiding geniuses.
You need a simple powerful message to win a national election (witness Bill Clinton's genius oratory at the Democratic convention last week) and usually that message has to be pretty ideological out there.
