Commentary The French essayist of Romanian origin, Emil Cioran, once said that it was astonishing that no one had ever renounced his life because of the prospect of having a biography written about him. What he meant by this, of course, was that no one would want everything about himself to be revealed to others; we all have much to hide. As it happens, Cioran himself had quite a lot to hide, for as a young man in Romania he had been an admirer of Hitler and Hitler’s Germany and an intellectual supporter of Romania’s very nasty fascist movement. Much of his work in France after the war fell halfway between atonement and cover-up. The life of a Western politician is dogged by something even worse than the prospect of a posthumous biography, however; namely, of being so incessantly in the public arena that every word he utters is taken …