Is Nigel Farage a racist? Is George Osborne a monetarist fanatic? As most newspaper browsers know to their cost, the answer to dramatically framed interrogations of this kind is usually “Of course not, but my editor thought we needed an eye-catching headline”. On the other hand, such exercises nearly always harbour interesting details that go some way to explain why the question can at least be seriously posed. So it proved with Edward Stourton’s entertaining inspection of the political views of the present pontiff (8 June).Given that Pope Francis has lately finessed a rapprochement between President Obama and the Cuban leader Raúl Castro and will soon be paying an official visit to the United States, it wasn’t at all surprising to find that most of the pros