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When Simon finally leaves home (presumably still shelling out for the lifestyle) she's not that bothered that the girls go and stay with him or even that he then also invites the girls' friends around to his bachelor pad (admittedly it is soon intermittently shared by a new compliant girlfriend). Never mind whether in real life the daughters' friends' mums would have been up for such sleep-overs anyway.

Fiona does raise a bit of an eyebrow when she hears stuff about his bath-times and bed-sharing with his girls, but seems to err greatly on the side of complacency about that too.

There's more. At least one of Fiona's relations finally rumbles what's going on and points out that whatever risks Fiona might choose to take on her girls' behalf, there is no way she ought to put her friends' children in harm's way. This astute and ordinarily jumpy woman tells Fiona that this isn't Fiona's secret to keep. Fiona doesn't at first respond to this thought very much. But then the relation doesn't shop Simon, as she might and probably would have. When Fiona finally says she'll shop Simon, he responds that they're off the social services' radar by now but adds that social services might take the children away from her, all of which seems deeply unlikely on nearly every score.

Anyway, from start to finish, Fiona never seems to care about Simon's possible behaviour with real little girls, and never bothers to play her very strong hand in negotiating with him some pretty strict limits. Doing so would have saved her young from risk and her way of life from meltdown by official involvement. I know Simon's a strong character and manipulative, Fiona wrecks the drama by being a quite intelligent but deeply dozy bird.

It's no good saying, as Andrew Billen does in The Times, that the drama is a sharp shock to those who say that looking at images isn't the same as perpetrating the abuse that leads to them. One can readily think both are crimes, whilst believing that they are crimes of importantly different orders.

Likewise, one can assert that looking at violent porn doesn't at all mean that a man would perpetrate the acts portrayed. The point that arises from Fiona's Story is that the show completely missed the extreme nervousness that Fiona ought to have felt on behalf of the children who come into intimate, private contact with a man with these tastes. Nearly every other mother on the planet would have.

Richard D. North is the author of Rich is Beautiful: A Very Personal Defence of Mass Affluence and Scrap the BBC!: Ten Years to Set Broadcasters Free.

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For forty years society has been pussy-footing around the poor black world. Black and white leaders have never dared challenge the mountain of victimhood which has been piled onto many black minds until they are all but dimmed. Rap represents this effect. It is a hymn to failure. But it amplifies the failure, too.

It's worse than McWhorter says
John McWhorter argues his case well, but he doesn't address the dire significance of hip-hop. He tells us that it can't save blacks and that it is symptomatic of poor thinking. But he doesn't give us a feeling for whether he thinks it's done much damage to blacks (let alone whites). For my part, I suspect that it is rather dangerous for a generation of blacks to invest so much in a culture whose purpose is to represent the darker and wicked impulses of the society they live in.

It occurs to me that rap music is so popular with young whites because they live in a society in which nastiness has been driven underground. Racism, homophobia and misogyny have been banned as jokes and very nearly as any sort of utterance. That they have been is mostly a good thing, but it leaves an enormous appetite for forbidden speech. Rap is a megawatt samizdat. White society has licensed the black rappers to articulate wickedness, and educated and uneducated whites alike queue up to imagine, think, fantasise, shout and swear all the thoughts that are off-limits. So one could argue that rap is a safety valve.

More white exploitation
Even so, this implies that white society has found yet another way of exploiting blacks. And some blacks get rich, and their bling and furs and vast cars are further celebrated as the fabulous vulgarity we whites don't quite dare exhibit. We are not quite atavistic enough, not quite vigorously egotistical, enough. White boys, especially, feel themselves to be neither male nor animal enough.

All this is, of course, deliciously ironic because so racist. Hip-hop rappers appear as a self-appointed embodiment of all the racial stereotypes they say they labour under. Of course, this may be a wry, post-modern twist on their predicament, of the not-beating but joining sort. Or it may be that they too have enjoyed the special licence they have been given. They love to be rude, just as their audiences do. Or as John McWhorter says, they've found it a good way to get a living without ordinary labour or thoughtfulness.

And The Wire, too
I am inclined to suppose, by the way, that the hugely lauded TV show, The Wire, is a sub-set of this phenomenon. On the black website, The Root, there is lively discussion of this possibility.

America's prime entertainment trope (as in the Batman series) is that the country is Gotham City. It is Sodom and Gomorrah. Again, blacks are useful here. They and their misery are the guilty product of America's evil. "I'm a monster y'all done created" goes one sophisticated rapper, says McWhorter. Blacks have become in their own words the worst of America and they bring out the worst in America.

Of course, there is courage and nobility amongst them, and wit. No-one's saying they're stupid (indeed, there is often a larger quotient of black intelligence on-screen than is humanly plausible). Occasionally the riffs include great dollops of charm, as in the Toons in Who Framed Roger Rabbit? But the black is most artistically valuable when enacting the evil that happens when victims become villains in revenge, and the blacks in the hood have stepped up to the plate for that role. We remarked some of this in a review of American Gangster.

McWhorter tells us what rap won't do, and what its apologists should stop claiming for it. But he doesn't tell us the uses to which it is put, either by whites or blacks. This is a weakness.

In one area, though, McWhorter seems spot on.

Blacks and politics
John McWhorter notes that the better sort of "conscious" rap argues that blacks should register to vote but does so on the assumption that people will then go and vote Democrat. McWhorter doubts it has actually produced many voters or much political awareness.

McWhorter rightly worries about various mistakes that rappers make. For starters, he notes:

Hip-hop is, in its very essence, angry. That can't help us.

The Black Panthers tried. That was forty years ago, and where are they now?

Letting blacks off
There are hints that the author feels that the entire academic establishment is barking up the wrong, lefty, tree. He takes a gentle swipe at the sociologist William Julius Wilson on these grounds. (Even more obliquely, so did Wilson's former student Sudhir Venkatesh in his Gang Leader For a Day.) McWhorter feels that blacks should not be allowed to believe that their lives are so tough that bad behaviour can be excused. Their grandparents had it tougher and mostly behaved much better.

McWhorter argues that a different sort of activism is needed. Above all he notes that there are many schemes (including welfare and education reforms made by Clinton and Bush Jnr) which have made a positive difference to blacks. He notes that at every level of improvement - philanthropic or political - it has too seldom been the black world which has understood what might work or started to do it. Activism should not be what McWhorter calls "oppositional". It should be constructive.

McWhorter brilliantly spells out why it is useless for blacks to pump out the bad stuff, and what a crying shame it is that more of them don't do real good. He points at a further tragedy. By caring enough about those who share his colour to discuss real solutions for their problems, a black is of course thought to have gone white. By being a bit of a right-winger McWhorter himself is thought to have become whitey's creature. The blacks really can't win - not like that, they can't.

Richard D. North is the author of Rich is Beautiful: A Very Personal Defence of Mass Affluence and Scrap the BBC!: Ten Years to Set Broadcasters Free.

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Hammershøi was painting at the end of the nineteenth and in the earliest years of the twentieth century when Denmark was particularly glum. The Danes' foolish alliance with Napoleon had cost them their fleet, destroyed by Nelson, the city of Copenhagen, which was bombarded into rubble by the British navy like Baltimore, and the Danish province of Norway which was given to Sweden as booty.

The bombardment gave rise to a new English verb, "to Copenhagen" meaning to destroy suddenly by a sneak naval attack. Jackie Fisher wanted to start World War I by "Copenhagening" Germany in this way in 1904. Then the Danish capital was occupied by the British military, who later did the same to Washington D.C. and they added insult to injury by garrisoning the town with Scotsmen in kilts.

In good King George's glorious days, when Britain set the world ablaze...

The people who had once been fierce adventurous Vikings and the explorers of Greenland now turned in on themselves and lapsed into a featureless introversion. Their inability in Hammershøi's day to relish the external world or to enjoy novelty stemmed from an inner sense of total loss and ruin. No wonder they feared the critic Georg Cohen Brandes who mocked their provincial lethargy.

In the face of these horrors most Danish artists fled to Skagen, the long thin peninsular at the very end of Jutland, the spit that marks their furthest northern point and is as far away from the core of Denmark as it is possible to get. It is also the only place in Denmark that ever gets any sun, though of course only for a few weeks in mid-summer. Here they painted bright and colourful, if crass, scenes of beaches where holiday makers could for a short while forget the horrors of being Danish in Denmark.

Hammershøi did exactly the opposite. He locked himself into his glum apartment in Copenhagen with his dull, though in fairness devoted and sweet-natured, wife and produced dull, glum interiors which he sold to his dentist. Since the days of Harald Bluetooth the Danes have loved dentists, a visit there reminds them that they are still alive. Besides a Hammershøi on the wall is as good as an anaesthetic.

All his interiors are the same, no play with light, no use of colour, no people or sense that there are any people there - empty, lonely, alienating. Each of them looks like the sad home of a recently bereaved widower, whose place has been forcibly tidied up by a cold, hard, bureaucratic, social worker who has also taken care to turn off all the lights when she left.

Yet, there was in fact a Mrs Hammershøi who long outlived the artist. She is the only person ever to be seen in this barren house but only from the back and always in a plain black dress that reaches to the floor. Her only erotic aspect is the long white bare neck between her tucked up hair and the edge of her dress, which always seems to be unbuttoned at the top.

Was it a fetish? Did Hammershøi nibble it in brief outbursts of desire. The dress itself is shapeless and utterly obliterates the shape of Mrs Hammershøi's secondary sexual characteristics to an extent that would satisfy the most fatuous of imams. You can hardly believe that Denmark was later to become the world's greatest producer of hard-core pornography. Perhaps it is necessary to arouse them from their dreadful ennui.

In his lifetime Hammershøi was much celebrated but after his death totally forgotten. Posterity showed more sense than his contemporaries and it is a pity that the RA has defied that good sense. Hammershøi's pictures should have been left for eternity in the basement of some gloomy provincial gallery in Aarhus, that overgrown village near Molbo whose famous town hall is a deliberate replica of Pentonville prison. They should be seen only by delinquent schoolchildren on forced visits and then as a punishment.

The curators' praise for him is as forced as these school visits. They compare his dark palette with that of Whistler, that master of the Thames at night. But Whistler is not boring; there is always excitement beneath the sombreness. Hammershøi did in fact visit London and produced paintings of the outside of the British Museum, choosing days when settled grey skies and dirt from urban chimneys blocked out all hint of sun.

The curators have the cheek to compare him with Monet who also came to London for the smoke and fog. But Monet's dirt in the sky swirls and changes and there is contrast, colour and a broad river to suit an impressionist. I am not saying that artists should not seek to capture boredom. Manet, Sickert and Hopper do it very well. But the depiction of boredom should not be boring. Hammershøi is. Someone should tell the curators that poetry is not meant to be silent.

Christie Davies has lectured in Denmark about the films of John Cleese to try and cheer the moody Danes up. He is the co-editor with Rajeev Dhavan of Censorship and Obscenity, which considers Denmark and admires the Danes' courageous refusal to back down over the Mohammed cartoons. Denmark has at last emerged into the sunlight and escaped from its sad and passive past.

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For however clumsily President Saakashvili of Georgia has handled the problem of the breakaway regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, which are part of his internationally-recognised sovereign territory, it is clear that the Russian leadership trapped him into this war.

It was Moscow which had encouraged these regions to rebel in the first place in order to maintain its influence in the region; it had deployed manifestly biased "peacekeepers" to freeze the situation to Georgia's disadvantage; it shot down Georgian aircraft; provoked Saakashvili in every possible way including the issuing of passports in the disputed areas; and sabotaged any attempts at a compromise settlement. The intervening troops were deployed well in advance, giving the lie to the idea that Moscow was simply responding to an escalating situation. All this reminds one of nothing so much as Bosnia in 1992, when the embattled Sarajevo government may not have been completely blameless but was manifestly the victim of a landgrab directed by an outside power.

It has been often and rightly said that this is not about South Ossetia, Georgia itself, or even the whole Caucasus, which has become an area critical to western energy security. Rather it is about the re-assertion of Russian power in the "Post-Soviet Space".

Moscow is determined to pre-empt the siting of a US missile shield - which she considers to be directed as much against herself as against the pretended threat of an Iranian or other "rogue" missile strike on the United States - near her western border. It is also firmly of the view that while the expansion of NATO into the Baltic states was bad enough, its absorption of Ukraine, Georgia and perhaps even Belarus is not to be countenanced under any circumstances. Moreover, the escalation of international tension with "historic" enemies allows the Kremlin to mobilise the Russian population behind the regime and distract from the lack of real democracy at home.

Round one, everybody agrees, has gone to Putin. NATO has been humiliated. The feeble western communiqués remind one of Bosnia, albeit this time with different faultlines. Europe has been characterised by division, as the French and Germans plead for appeasement while the United States and Great Britain have argued for a tougher stance.

The calling of an EU summit in September is reminiscent of another conference, summoned by the European powers in the early summer of 1992 in the hope that the war would be over by the time the powers convened in London in August. (Although in this case the reason does not seem to have been prevarication but unwillingness to come home from holidays early!). All this has sent a shiver down spines in the Ukraine, Poland, the Baltic States, and all those with cause to fear a resurgent Russia.

So what is to be done? The first thing to note is that vacuums cause instability. The Russians have shown no signs of intervening militarily where NATO is already established. Both Georgia and the Ukraine must therefore be put on the path to rapid membership; NATO forces should be deployed eastwards in order to give article five security guarantee the necessary credibility. Turkey should be brought more speedily into the EU and its role in order to consolidate its position within the western system. The United Nations Security Council must demand full withdrawal of Russian forces from both Abkhazia and South Ossetia, and authorise NATO to enforce a no-fly zone over sovereign Georgian territory, leaving it to the North Atlantic Council to decide whether it wishes to confront Russian expansionism now - or at some future date.

None of this is without very considerable risks. It is just possible that the Kremlin will gamble on the lack of political will in Washington and European capitals, and press forward to occupy the rest of Georgia, and even parts of the Ukraine. It has already threatened the redeployment of nuclear weapons to the Baltic, and warned that it might stop the flow of supplies to allied forces in Afghanistan from the north.

Yet with Turkey to the south, NATO is closer than many think, and the Russians will find deploying large-scale armoured formations in the narrow gorges of the Caucasus very difficult without air cover.

Finally, Russia itself has at least one geopolitical hostage of its own: the enclave of Kaliningrad, the former East Prussia, from which the German population was ethnically cleansed in 1944-1945. In the new security environment, leaving a Russian nuclear naval base in Kaliningrad behind NATO lines is akin to having Soviet SS-20 missiles in Luxemburg during the cold war. Sooner or later Berlin is going to have to think hard about this one. The Kremlin may rue the day when it decided to revise the territorial settlement in Europe.

Dr Brendan Simms is Professor in the History of International Relations at the Centre of International Studies at the University of Cambridge and co-President of the Henry Jackson Society.

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For once there is not a hint of disappointment. The stage is generally plain, sharing its mirrored background with the current production of A Midsummer Night's Dream. Effects such as chandeliers for the court and a bed for the bedchamber are simple but effective. Costume is a bit of a mixed bag, but unequivocally modern; Hamlet shoots Polonius instead of stabbing him, Gertrude draws on a cigarette in the privacy of her own bedroom and the final duel is fought in modern fencing kit. I’m not sure what is left out from the hugely long First Quarto version, but it’s nothing I missed or remembered and the production is well over three hours on stage without ever dragging.

At the core of this hugely successful production is the brilliance of Tennant who speaks every word clearly and as if he's just thought of it. His Hamlet is an immensely unhappy young man who is also capable of a bitter joy at his own wit, his own eccentricity and, increasingly, at his own capacity for violence. At the end of the performance he was cheered by young and old alike, though I have mixed feelings about seeing three hundred fans gathered round a stage door in Stratford.

Our very English tradition here is that actors and audience both slip off quietly to the Dirty Duck once formalities have been completed - though I'm sure we'll get back to this. But I must insist that, contrary to some allegations, Stewart and Tennant cannot be thought of as imported stars: Stewart calls Stratford home and Tennant had his first big parts in Stratford. I especially remember him as an excellent Antipholus of Syracuse in the 2000 production of The Comedy of Errors.

The rest of the cast are very good. As always, Stewart is excellent, increasingly immobile, impotent and appalled as events and his nephew-stepson spiral out of control. Penny Downie as Gertrude suggests the sort of upper class hostess whose elegant exterior clothes a torn soul. Oliver Ford Davies is wonderfully funny and pompous as Polonius, the sort of old geezer who talks a lot of sense but makes it sound like nonsense. If anyone struggles it is Mariah Gale as Ophelia: her "real" madness looks a lot more feigned than Hamlet's more ambiguous version.

All in all this is performance to treasure and to restore the faith. RSC tickets will be changing hands as never before on ebay, despite sternly emailed warnings from the Company that this is not an acceptable practice.

Lincoln Allison retired from an academic career in 2004 to become a freelance writer and broadcaster. He remains Emeritus Reader in Politics at the University of Warwick and Visiting Professor in sport and leisure at the University of Brighton.

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The Archbishop's job is to defend the faith, not any old faith, whatever Big Ears of Windsor may argue. It is time these two dreadful Taffies minded their duty in this respect. The entire moral superiority of Christianity lies in the undergoing by one of God's three persons of the full experience of suffering and death of a human being. Who would want to trust and obey a mere tyrannical abstraction? Only a slave...

We can further see the grotesquely intolerant behaviour of the Taliban in Murphy's photograph of citizens of Kabul hiding on the roofs of their houses in September 1996, while the Taliban roam the streets enforcing Sharia Law. We can see it in the wounded Afghan limping in the foreground past the cliff which held an ancient, peerless (I saw it), giant statue of Buddha before the Taliban wantonly blew it up. At one time this entire region, including much of Pakistan and in India Kashmir was strongly Buddhist.

In outer Kashmir towards little Tibet there is a frontier between the Moslems and the Buddhists that was long ago determined by the point of failure of the supply lines of an invading Muslim army advancing into the ancestral lands of the Buddhists. That was as far as the army and the religion of the sword could reach.

On one side of the line there are Buddhist villages where many women but relatively few children are to be seen. On the other there are Muslim villages where the women hide in their hovels and the children that they have been forced to bear tumble over one another in the poverty that their increasing numbers have created. The Buddhists are angry because the desperately poor Muslims show their usual total lack of respect for other religions by tramping tourists through the Buddhist sacred places for a few rupees. The Buddhists are not wealthy but at least they understand the lessons of Malthus.

In fairness Murphy does make the point that most Afghans find the intolerance of the Taliban intolerable and abhor their fanaticism and extremism, much as we look back with horror on Savonarola or Torquemada, Friar Miroslav Filipović or Monsignor Josef Tiso, or indeed Meir David Kahane. We get a quite different picture of the Afghan Muslims from his Sufi Ceremony, October 2004, with its sense of spiritual departure from the world of violence outside.

Likewise we can appreciate the quiet piety of Ahmad Shah Masoud depicted in several photographs. Masoud had played a key role in driving out the Soviet socialist invader and in overthrowing the local communist rulers in 1992. He became a member of the new Afghan government but soon the Taliban started their bitter and ruthless civil war and drove him out. There have now been 25 years of war in Afghanistan and there are two million war widows. Masoud was murdered by two suicide bomber posing as Arab journalists in 2001. Many of Murphy's photographs are taken from the front line of that civil war, showing watchers of and defenders against the Taliban.

Here too from a later date are the gallant American troops of the 82nd Airborne division looking for caches of arms and the infiltrating Taliban. The frontier grave is far away. Yet it is more than sed miles, sed pro patria; they are fighting against evil. The civil war in Afghanistan began long before the Americans arrived and took far more lives than they ever will.

The West's crime is that it ignored Afghanistan after the Soviets had been driven out and pretended that the tyranny of the Taliban was not happening. It was only Osama bin Laden's planning of violence from his Taliban base that provoked the NATO intervention and here in the exhibition is a photograph of Osama on television in November 2001 before the fall of Kabul. To it is attached the comment:

Ironically the message of his survival is delivered by a medium outlawed by the Taliban.

By contrast, in Peshawar on the Pakistan side of the frontier, heavy clothing enveloped the women entirely and even their eyes could not be seen; they themselves could only look out at the world from between the tiny square holes in the grill that concealed their eyes. Two of the Western women with me left me behind and went to the house of some of these women to try on their garments. They reported back of the hot and uncomfortable prison cell of clothes that they had experienced. They told me that the Muslim women had laughed and laughed at their appearance. They knew that such clothes were mere custom, albeit one in which they themselves were trapped.

I had forgotten this incident until I saw Murphy's photograph Mother and Daughter returning from the fields, November 2004. The bare headed, bare faced daughter too young to be covered up is carrying a ewe and reveals a pretty face to the camera. The mother stands in her gaol of cloth. Kemal Ataturk had a point. Perhaps even Hewlett Johnson, the Red Dean of Canterbury, may have done when he praised Lenin's tearing off of veils in Russian Central Asia. But I doubt the sense of any Canterbury appeaser.

The saddest picture, though, is that of Isaac Levi one of the Last Two Jews in Kabul, November 2001. The two men live in the same apartment but due to a feud have refused to speak to each other for several years. No doubt this could be the subject of a good Jewish joke but I was too moved by his loneliness even to think of such a thing.

The exhibition and the book alike are truly excellent in their black and white photography, which well reveal the technical skill and the artistic sense of the man who took them.

In his youth Christie Davies was once a visiting scholar at a number of Indian universities and has visited Afghanistan, Pakistan and the Indian state of Kashmir.

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Yet the Games are what academics now call a "global mega-event". In reality they are the only such event. Sport reaches the places and parts which other aspects of culture cannot reach and the games are so structured as to have something for everybody: witness Thailand's national celebrations when a Thai boxer won the country’s first ever gold medal in 1996! Football's World Cup may be bigger in several different respects, but the finals only directly involve 32 of FIFA's 205 members and, in any case, large parts of South Asia and North America have no interest in the sport.

But the distinct sporting image and role of the games has gradually dissolved over the last thirty years. In Montreal in 1976, despite boycotts and the Cold War and shamateurism there was something of the distinct "Olympic Spirit" about the event.

There was still at least a powerful legacy of why Pierre de Coubertin had wanted to convert the world to organised games and to found a "Jeux Arnoldien" because he thought he had discovered the revived spirit of European chivalry located in the heart of a commercial society. His conversion to Ancient Greek imagery for his world games has proved a marketing masterstroke. Montreal was certainly not a commercial event and it was for young people at the peak of their avocation for sport who would then go off to be lawyers or missionaries or army officers rather than for career competitors. It was an alternative to everyday sport, but also had a claim to be the pinnacle of sporting achievement.

All of this was lost during the period, 1980-2002, when Juan Samaranch was President of the IOC. The Games are now commercial as well as professional, though given the power of television, the bankruptcy of the Olympic Movement after Montreal and the end of the Cold War there may have been no alternative.

What is left - in purely sporting terms - is no longer either alternative or major. Olympic sport falls into two categories: it is either minor sport or it is a minor event in a major sport. Interest has declined in a range of what I will ball the bio-chemical sports including track and field, swimming, weightlifting, cycling and so on.

Part of the reason is competition: commercial televised sport offers a lot of more interesting alternatives. But the main reason is doping. It doesn't matter whether you believe that the athletes you are watching in 2008 are "clean" or not because you know that the legacy of records and champions is "dirty" and you know that a weak character on a good and well-disguised steroid regime can put a shot further than a hero who hasn't taken anything.

In popular and skilled sports like tennis and football the Games are simply a minor event; like the Davies Cup or the Ryder Cup they may challenge you to put your patriotism and public image ahead of your career plans.

In short, the Games are the global mega-event, but essentially a sham sporting event. While they are on there are powerful forces trying to persuade us otherwise. One is the BBC which retains coverage of the Games though it has lost rights over most popular sports.

Another is government: not only have governments always tended to see Olympic performance as a reflection on themselves but ours, like most modern states, has spent a good deal of our money on securing games and enhancing performances. This is largely because Olympic sport is something they can hope to influence whereas real big-time global sport is beyond their remit.

And finally journalists, who make up more than a quarter of the Beijing audience and for whom attendance at the games is an important C/V issue, will also be telling us it's the real thing.

But are we being convinced? And, more importantly, will we remain convinced as we approach London 2012?

Lincoln Allison is the author of several books on sport including Amateurism in Sport (2001) and The Global Politics of Sport (2005), both currently available from Routledge. He is Visiting Professor in the Politics of Sport at the Chelsea school of Sport and Leisure at Brighton University.

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An important shift over the last seventy years is that toward a higher participation ratio in higher education for women, as marriage is postponed. Again, this would affect the results.

Have good grades in university exams become easier? I cannot comment on mathematics and the sciences, but can make some suggestions for the Arts based on discussion with others and personal experience: professor at Durham and Exeter, external examiner at Anglia, Bristol, Newcastle, Northumbria, Southampton and Sunderland. The key point is that whereas I do see a greater reluctance to award lower grades, I do not see a comparable willingness to award firsts. Thus, rather than a general rise, there is a bulging of marks, with the 2:1 becoming the grade of preference. If criticism is due, it should focus on that. 90% of the mark-scale is under-employed. That again, however, is an aspect of a society in which fear of litigation and the impact of social mores combine to make (exceptional) merit or poor performance appear less possible than a general sameness. Universities may be part of the problem, but they are not responsible for it.

Jeremy Black is Professor of History, University of Exeter. He is the author - amongst much else - of The Slave Trade (2007), A Short History of Britain (2007), The Holocaust (2008), and The Curse of History (2008).

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All this has provoked the wrath of the redoubtable Waldemar Januszczak in the Sunday Times. He asks:

Why is the Imperial War Museum celebrating James Bond, when James Bond and his Aston Martin and his girls and his gadgets have nothing to do with the terrible realities of war, and when our young men are having their legs blown away in Afghanistan and Iraq?

Is the exhibition then simply "cold war lite", part of the universal dumbing-down of British culture, another egregious example of the penetration of "cool Britannia" even into the shrine of the nation's military tradition?

The charge, though understandable, is unfair for two reasons. First of all, the exhibition provides ample background on just how much real war went into the creation of the fictional hero. Ian Fleming's much-loved and admired father was killed on the western front in 1917. His brother, the celebrated traveller and writer Peter Fleming, served with distinction in many theatres of the war, and some have seen him as the model for Bond.

Fleming himself spent the war in Naval Intelligence, and although he never saw action, he did witness the shambles at Dieppe in 1942 from the uncomfortable closeness of an offshore destroyer. His much-loved boss Admiral John Godfrey was the model of Bond's wry superior "M".

Moreover, Fleming's wartime travels to the United States and the Caribbean informed some of his fictional locations. If one were to criticise the exhibition here, it is that - to borrow the terminology of the doyen of British intelligence history, Professor Christopher Andrew - the emphasis on glamorous human intelligence work or "humint" tends to obscure the very much more important contribution made by signals intelligence or "sigint".

Secondly, the whole Bond brand is actually part and parcel of British power projection. We tend not to miss this because the phenomenon has often been seen as a piece of escapism to sweeten the end of empire: the exhibition text tells us the stories also:

offered an eager readership... [the solace] that Britain was a force to be reckoned with.

All the same, Bond functions as a force-multiplier for Britain. He has persuaded millions of foreigners that the British secret service is an organisation of mythical reach (which it manifestly is not). Bond did more than anybody or anything else, including the revelations about the Enigma triumphs, to repair the disastrous impact of the Burgess, Maclean and Philby scandals.

Bond has also been a compelling advertisement for the western way of life: quick repartee, fast cars, elegant women, and high-tech gadgets - all the things that make life worth living. For sheer generic product-placement, hedonism and consumerism, the Bond brand is hard to beat. No wonder the Royal Mail issued a set of commemorative James Bond postage stamps in January of this year.

This leaves one wondering whether Bond might not make a more substantial contribution to the "war on terror" and the war of ideas with radical Islamism. Could he not be sent to neutralise Teheran's nuclear programme, or to liberate the Arabs in Khuzestan (where the Iranians already believe us to be up to no good)? Couldn't he smuggle bibles into Saudi Arabia, much as the Beatles subverted the Soviet Union? Sadly we often cannot do without the military "hard power" to which most of the Imperial War Museum is devoted. The power that makes people do what we want them to do is indeed important. But let us also recognise the seductive power of Bond who helps us to persuade people to want what we want.

The author thanks Miss A. M. Knox for research carried out in support of this piece.

Dr Brendan Simms is Professor in the History of International Relations at the Centre of International Studies at the University of Cambridge and co-President of the Henry Jackson Society.

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Aside from that item the games made a profit. The costs were £15,000 with revenues of £21,377. Rather than some multi million pound Quango an eccentric aristocrat called Lord Desborough set up a committee of those with the same amateur credentials as the sportsmen they were preparing to welcome. Lord Desborough had earlier proved his own athletic credentials in Egypt when he was chased by a group of dervishes and made it back to British lines without dropping his umbrella.

This volume may be called Olympic Follies. But at least the folly was within budget.

The failure to include flags for all the participating nations - including the United States - did prompt some ill feeling. When the American team was presented to King Edward their shot putter Ralph Rose - who was carrying their team's flag - did not lower it. Fellow team member Martin Sheridan, a hammer thrower, declared:

This flag dips to no earthly king.

Nor was this the only dispute with the Americans. In the Tug of War they complained that the British team - consisting of policemen from Liverpool - had an unfair advantage because they were wearing their normal working boots. What a pity that Tug of War is no longer an Olympic sport.

Then there was a race which was abandoned after the (British) judges cried: "Foul". The British competitor Wyndham Hallswelle had his path blocked by the Americans John Carpenter and William Robbins who were running shoulder to shoulder. The race was then rerun with the Americans refusing to take part. "Hallswelle that Ends Well" ran the newspaper reports of his victory.

It wasn't just the organisers who did it on the cheap. The Australians and the New Zealanders pooled resources to provide a combined Australasian team - not something I would envisage when they return here in 2012. Their combined Olympic Committee told athletes that so long as they could obtain a:

decent standard in their sport preference would be given to those who could pay their own fares to Britain or who were already living in that country.

Some much-needed light relief was provided by the appearance of the Australasian team in the line-up. The 27 Australians and three New Zealanders marched behind their flag bearer, the New Zealander Henry St Aubyn Murray. He had already won the New Zealand 440 yards hurdles championship on three occasions and was to do so twice more. While most of the other teams were wearing well-cut athletic uniforms, the completely unsubsidised Australasians looked more like a rag-tag-and-bob tail outfit. Efforts had been made to supply a uniform for the occasion but obviously the clothing ordered had not reached the athletes from the tailors. Some contestants were wearing t-shirts and shorts, while others were in swimming costumes. Most were wearing ill fitting green caps. One newspaper account described them as looking "impoverished".

Harry Phibbs is a journalist.

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This volume is greatly enhance by direct quotes from his contemporary diary entries. Here is his account of one early cabinet meeting:

She also has a go at me. She starts off by calling me "dear", which does not go down well. Having heard a few of her views on the nationalised transport industries I decide that enough is enough and point out that she has got it wrong. If she looks at the four "nationalised" industries in transport she will see that we have denationalised two of them. We have introduced competition into another for the first time in half a century. As for railways, which are her hate, we are denationalising the subsidiary companies and achieving more in manpower reductions than at any stage for a decade.

My fight had been to get the pledges into the manifesto at all and make them firm commitments for the incoming government. In 1979 the fear was that such radicalism might frighten the voters.

His time at the giant department of Health and Social Security proved less happy but after the 1987 election he was made Employment Secretary. Fowler states:

As luck would have it on my first outing a few days later I was able to report that unemployment had dropped below the three million mark, and in each of the next thirty months I was able to announce further falls.

Ironically, Fowler recounts his efforts to achieve Thatcherite reforms during his time in this brief - banning strikes in essential services, privatizing job centres - were thwarted by Thatcher. As Employment Secretary he did get through abolition of the National Dock Labour Scheme. He says:

Today if you go to vibrant ports such as Bristol you can see the effect of taking regulations off.

My own view was that, although she often went storming over the top, it could bring out the best in her ministers. Of course, not everyone shares my view but personally I enjoyed her direct confrontational style. The adrenalin rose and you gave of your best. She put you under pressure but it enabled you to argue back.

Attempts made to improve the situation included a dinner for cabinet ministers and their spouses in 1989 for the Government's tenth anniversary.

If ever I am tempted to say something nice about the BBC, Denis soon persuades me against,

Sometimes at cabinet meetings Margaret Thatcher would tell a joke. In February 1989 there was dismay:

not only on salmonella in eggs but also on a new scare concerning soft cheese. It led Nick Ridley to observe mournfully that raw eggs and soft cheese were about the only things he ate. Thatcher responded that as he was not pregnant he would probably survive.

Given his rather mild views on Europe, for him the key matter is the "political suicide" of the Conservatives in allowing themselves to be divided over it. It was Fowler who was left to face the TV cameras after Britain crashed out of the ERM.

But for some Party unity was not the priority. After a long period in office there were plenty personally disgruntled. Then there were the Eurosceptics, who felt our future as a self governing nation was at threat, and the small number of Europhiles, who had an equally fervent transferred patriotism to a country called Europe. These loyalties transcended those to Party. Fowler also gloomily accounts all the other mishaps of this time such as by-election defeats and sleaze scandals.

Despite, or perhaps because, of his journalistic background Fowler includes in the "lessons" he offers at the end that "slavishly wooing" the media is counterproductive. Maybe so. At any rate this is a thoroughly readable account. Fowler comes across as having been straight with his colleagues and of being straight with the reader. He is unrestrained in his criticism but there is not a tone of rancour. Given the subject matter, that is something of a triumph.

Harry Phibbs is a journalist and a Conservative Councillor in Hammersmith and Fulham. The views expressed above are those of Harry Phibbs, not those of the Social Affairs Unit, its Trustees, Advisors or Director. The Social Affairs Unit is not a party political organisation.