"THE past is another country, they do things differently there."

This oft-quoted phrase, from LP Hartley's novel The Go-Between, was brought to mind recently by another major piece of our literary heritage - the tales of Tintin, intrepid cub reporter and fashion icon.

Our hero has been in a spot of bother over allegations he is racist. The Commission For Racial Equality (CRE) went so far as to say that one of the books about his adventures, Tintin In The Congo, was so offensive it should be taken off the shelves.

So the big question is, is Tintin racist? The answer, I suspect, is probably yes.

I accept that's a bit of a sweeping statement. For one thing, I haven't actually read the book in question - it's a scarce product now, as internet bookseller Amazon reported its sales had shot up by nearly 4,000 per cent, getting it to number eight in its books top ten, since the racism allegations were made.

I do remember the Tintin cartoons they used to show on TV when I was a kid. Even then it was clear he, Snowy, Captain Haddock and their pals were living in some bizarre time warp, particularly where dress sense was concerned.

Villains were generally of the swarthy type, and I remember our hero battling a particularly hostile Arab (of the traditional, robed, camel-riding variety, of course) after his aeroplane crashed in the desert.

So it wouldn't surprise me at all to learn that a story about Tintin visiting central Africa included a depiction of local people which could be considered patronising, and which appeared inappropriate to modern tastes.

Which is the whole point - Tintin wasn't written yesterday.

His first adventure was penned in 1929, and attitudes have changed an awful lot since then. The CRE partly acknowledged this, but thought the offending volume should be placed in special section, with a health warning about its outmoded values.

All I can say is, an awful lot of other works from the past few centuries would be following it. Mind you, looking at the sales of Tintin In The Congo, booksellers might consider it as a positive marketing ploy.

But there is surely another point here, which is why I added the quote at the beginning of this article.

What the furore over Tintin has highlighted, in a rather ridiculous way, is the modern habit of judging the past by the standards of the present, usually in a negative, and dare I say, patronising way.

The trouble is, in many cases the people involved simply didn't think the way we do, and it doesn't remotely help us to understand the way they behaved by assuming they did.

This doesn't just apply to literature, but to historical events - a habit which, I suspect, helps to fuel the modern phenomenon of campaigns calling for apologies for past misdeeds.

For instance, these days the Crusades are often highlighted as the forerunner of modern colonialism, and a prime example of western oppression and aggression against the Islamic world.

But brief analysis suggests the crusades were actually pretty disastrous enterprises from the "Western" point of view. Only the first succeeded in its aims; subsequent expeditions usually failed miserably, or even damaged Christian interests more than Muslim ones.

And to point the finger of blame at the crusaders for thinking it was okay to go out conquering other people's territory is ludicrous. In their time such behaviour was considered acceptable, even honourable, as the Franco-Norman adventurers who brutally subjugated a kingdom full of fellow European Christians (that's England, by the way) shortly before the first crusade could have told you.

Their Muslim counterparts might have said the same. Islamic warriors had previously conquered Spain and pushed into France, while after the Crusades the Turks got as far as Vienna before their conquests in eastern Europe were halted. Both they and the crusaders would have said they were doing God's work.

That's not to say it would be right to do the same thing today, any more than it would be a good idea for a modern author to turn out a book on Africa which reflected outmoded attitudes.

But to hold the past to account for not reflecting the present simply invites ridicule. Just ask Tintin - he's laughing all the way to the cartoon bank.