This is a first-rate book but with one fundamental caveat. Drescher, University Professor of History and Sociology at the University of Pittsburgh and a distinguished scholar on the subject, does not in fact provide a history of slavery. Instead, he largely restricts himself to the period since 1450. This of course leads to a particular conspectus for slavery, that of the expanding empires and developing trade routes of the period.

Moreover, as Drescher notes, he has

attended less to East Asian slavery in this study of the global rhythms of slavery and antislavery. China, Korea, and Japan all exhibited their own variants of the institution. For the most part, their institutions followed internal cycles, independent of developments beyond the region. Where I did find congruencies, I attempted to incorporate them into this account.

hat it is nearly impossible to master the cascade of scholarship that has inundated the fields of slavery and abolition during the past half century of historiography.

This point, however, finds Drescher at a marked advantage for after the standard narrative organised in the parts of the book in terms of Extension, Crisis and Contraction, there is a fourth part, Reversion. This devotes due attention to the nature of slavery in the twentieth century, notably in the Soviet Union and in the Nazi empire, but with attention also to other episodes, such as the use of enforced labour by Wilhelmine Germany.

Coerced labour in Africa and Asia is also discussed, albeit too briefly. There is, for example, a failure to consider in detail the current situation in Sudan. Moreover, the state slavery of North Korea is neglected. These points raise a question about Drescher's confidence that slavery now is again in retreat; and there is a more general need to consider how far the pretensions, demands, surveillance and violence of many modern governments can be seen as ensuring elements of state slavery albeit far less so than North Korea or Hoxha's Albania.

Drescher's study therefore is at once a skilful, well-written and absorbing account of the established subject of slavery and anti-slavery, a valuable extension of that into the twentieth century, and yet also an incomplete work.

Jeremy Black is Professor of History, University of Exeter. He is the author - amongst much else - of The Slave Trade.

An advertisement in a recent edition of the British Medical Journal caught my eye. It was for a Senior Adviser, Access, placed by the International Planned Parenthood Federation, one of those many organisations that live and breathe and take their being in the large no man's land between government and charity.

Like every applicant for every job these days, the applicant "will be an exceptional leader and strategist" and will "have excellent interpersonal skills" - that is to say, he will at the very least be plausible and manipulative. The advertisement goes on to say that "CVs will not be accepted", presumably on the grounds that past performance is no guide to future performance.

None of this startled me. It was the beginning of the final paragraph that did so, the first sentence being the only one in the whole advertisement to be in heavy type:

Applications are particularly welcome from candidates openly living with AIDS/HIV.

IPPF is committed to equal opportunities and cultural diversity.

Let us assume that the first of these meanings is the one that is meant. There is surely something very peculiar about the particular welcome to be given by the IPPF to such people, not because one wishes such people any harm, but because one does not see anything particularly virtuous or worthy of particular welcome in their affliction. Is it the openness that is particularly welcomed, or the HIV/AIDS, or the combination of the two? That is to say, if a person kept the fact that he had HIV/AIDS to himself, would he not be a particularly welcome applicant?

You might remember that there was a time within living memory when a lot of effort went into persuading people that AIDS should be regarded as just another illness, albeit one with its own characteristics, clinical and epidemiological - which, indeed, it must have had in order to be a recognisably different illness in the first place. As it happens, this was a point of view that accorded completely with my own from the very first, and I therefore had no difficulty accepting it.

So why, if AIDS is just another illness, do we never see an advertisement particularly welcoming applicants living with syphilis/general paralysis of the insane, or cancer/secondaries, or hepatitis C/hepatoma, or any number of others that one could think of?

The fact is that the advertisement demands doublethink of us: that we accept simultaneously that AIDS is just one disease among others on the one hand, and that it is completely and categorically different on the other. We are expected, in most cases rightly, to perform this mental operation without even noticing it. And we do so, because we are accustomed to doing so.

Let us now turn briefly to the weasel word "particularly", or "particularly welcome". What does it actually mean? How particular is the "particular" of particularly welcome? What effect on the final choice of candidate for the job will the particular welcome have? If it has none, why include it in the advertisement? In what sense, then, is the welcome particular? Extra tea and biscuits?

On the other hand, if it has some actual effect on the choice, in what sense can the IPPF then claim to be an equal opportunity employer? That all opportunities are equal, but some are more equal than others?

Whatever sense (not much, outside of apartheid states) can be given to the term "Equal opportunity employer", it surely cannot mean the giving of what amounts to sheltered employment to people with certain favoured or designated diseases. And this is so even if the only other meaning of the term is the random selection of employee from the list of candidates, if not from the electoral roll or from the population of the entire world.

I will pass over in dignified silence the juxtaposition of people living openly with HIV/AIDS with the commitment to cultural diversity. For even if HIV/AIDS is contracted largely through activities that are associated with subcultures, I doubt that this is what is meant by encouraging cultural diversity.

Let us briefly consider cultural diversity from another angle. What it means in this context, I think, is "Anyone from anywhere, provided that he or she accepts our ideas". It cannot really mean anything else, because the successful candidate is supposed to have, in addition to the other qualities I have mentioned, "a sound understanding of sexual and reproductive health and rights, research and evidence based programmes".

I am no anthropologist, but I do not think it is necessary to be one to know that "sexual and reproductive rights" (of which the IPPF calls itself "a leading advocate") are not, and never have been, human universals, recognised in all times and all places by all cultures. Let us suppose that we uttered the phrase "sexual and reproductive rights" to David Hume (let alone Genghis Khan): what would it mean to him?

This is not to say that I am against such rights: only to point out that you cannot advocate them and fail to discriminate against people, quite likely of another culture, who do not recognise them.

So the advertisement placed in the BMJ by the IPPF is a typical modern utterance of a certain kind: one that wishes to convey virtue without the difficult work of actually being virtuous. It has the moral seriousness of Messrs Podsnap and Veneering in Our Mutual Friend. It would be just as amusing as that fiction, if it were not rather a symptom of a deep malaise in our culture: the corruption of language.

Theodore Dalrymple is a writer and worked for many years as an inner city and prison doctor. He is the author of the author of Junk Medicine: Doctors, Lies and the Addiction Bureaucracy and In Praise of Prejudice: The Necessity of Preconceived Ideas.

Northern Rock, that so distinguished itself by becoming the first British bank for nearly a century and a half on which there was a run by depositors, and which is now, perforce, owned by the British taxpayer, is sponsoring, that is probably to say subsidising, Newcastle United Football Club for the 2010/2011 football season to the tune of £10 million.

By Northern Rock's past high standards of financial incompetence, of course, £10 million is but small change, hardly even worth taking notice of, being but the losses incurred in a bad five minutes. In defending the decision, however, the current chief executive, Gary Hoffman, said, in words that do not exactly inspire confidence in the precision of his thought, that the decision would provide "an important community link," as well as a "high return on investment and good strategic fit".

By the latter, presumably, he meant that the taxpayer's payment to the football club in question would return a profit, and a good one at that, higher than some other use to which the £10 million might be put.

The main argument in favour of the subsidy (for that is what it will be, if no tangible economic benefit is received in return) is that it will keep the name of Northern Rock to the forefront of the British public's mind. In the first place, I am not sure that the British public will be entirely delighted by or grateful for this reminder; in the second, we need to know the purpose of keeping the name of Northern Rock to the forefront of the British public's mind. To drum up more business? But what kind of person either lends or borrows money from a bank because its name appears on the shirts of footballers and other paraphernalia of sporting events? I should have thought that by now we had had enough of casual financial decision-taking.

What about the "community link", of which Mr Hoffman speaks so imprecisely? There seems to be in it the implication that the fostering of a sense of community is a good thing in itself, but this is not so. The Hitler Youth no doubt fostered a sense of community among young German males, but it was to a thoroughly evil end. It would be an exaggeration to compare the sense of community fostered by enthusiasm for football with that fostered by the Hitler Youth, of course, but it is nevertheless worth examining what that sense of community leads to, and what it consists of.

A friend of mine lives near a large football stadium belonging to one of the most eminent English clubs: English, that is, in the sense of being located in England. He is frequently inconvenienced by the crowds attending the matches; for a whole day at a time, many times in a season, he cannot venture out of his home unless he is prepared to brave or witness the somewhat menacing, drunken, degraded, vulgar, loud and destructive behaviour of the crowd, some members of which use his street as a public lavatory. On occasion, he has even been prevented from returning home by the arrangements made for the convenience of this crowd; they have cost him many hours of extra travel. Of course, he cannot possibly be alone in this: it must apply to many hundreds or
thousands of others.

His wife relates the story of how, when she saw someone urinating in her street, she approached a policeman, who returned the answer that people must be allowed to enjoy themselves. This, of course, would also be a perfect justification for public executions, if the enjoyment of the spectators were the sole criterion by which a spectacle and the behaviour surrounding it were to be judged. I have little doubt that public executions would also foster a sense of community; did not Durkheim suggest that criminals themselves served that very function?

This is a justification neither for public executions nor for criminality, however.

Then we may consider the question as to whether professional football in England requires or deserves a public subsidy, from Northern Rock or any other source. It appears to me that it does not. It is true that many English football clubs do not return a profit, in which case they should either be the playthings of very rich men, prepared to bear the loss in so noble a cause, or the wages of the employees should be lowered until they reach a level at which the clubs do make a profit. (The combined wage bill of the two principal Manchester clubs is £200 million per year.)

It might be argued that without subsidies of one kind or another the quality of English professional football would suffer. I do not think this would matter in the slightest; but let us for the moment take it seriously and ask why it would have this effect when so large a proportion of the population is interested in football to the extent of willingness to pay large sums of money to the providers of it?

I can only assume that it is because, without subsidy, the English league would not be able to attract the foreign players who are so necessary to it. English players alone are not sufficient, in large part because they are not good enough; and they are not good enough because they emerge from a culture that does not foster the kind of self-discipline necessary to become and remain really good at it: the kind of culture, in fact, with which Northern Rock is so anxious to make "a community link" at public expense.

Theodore Dalrymple is a writer and worked for many years as an inner city and prison doctor. He is the author of the author of Junk Medicine: Doctors, Lies and the Addiction Bureaucracy and In Praise of Prejudice: The Necessity of Preconceived Ideas.

In case you haven't heard: the England football captain, John Terry (now the former England football captain) made love to Vanessa Perroncel, a French lingerie model and the mother of the child of the reserve England left back, Wayne Bridge. Mrs Terry has left for Dubai; Mr Bridge has publicly refused to shake hands with Mr Terry and has withdrawn his services from the national football team.

Meanwhile, England's first-choice left back, Ashley Cole, has been unfaithful to Mrs Cole who is, herself, highly marketable and independently wealthy, despite being a Geordie. They have parted and Mr Cole is said to be distraught; he cannot throw himself into his work because he is injured. The England team risk going into the World Cup Finals in South Africa with low morale and no experienced left back. Mr Carlos Tevez, an Argentinan footballer resident in England, has remarked that where he comes from Terry would have his legs broken or worse. (He is a porteňo from one of the poorer parts of Buenos Aires.)

You might think this is all terminally boring, a predictable sex-and-football saga dug up for the amusement of the tabloid-reading masses - and you would be right, except that I think there are one or two points here which are of considerable interest to the social theorist. The first is the persistent belief, promulgated by sports administrators and journalists, that "sportsmen" should be "role models".

In one sense this is preposterous, though I still come across it all the time. Unfortunately, there is a sense in which it is true: the only conception of the good life which is received by many dim young males is of a highly paid sports career in which celebrity and a bunch of cracking birds are the normal perquisites. Only a fraction of one per cent of those who aspire to this can have it - and often it doesn't seem to do them much good.

I would also argue that the behaviour of footballers isn't too bad when you consider that they are a bunch of dim, under-educated, very highly paid young men who have a lot of time on their hands and not much to think about except their next shag and their next tattoo. Film stars aren't much different, but nobody suggests they should be role models - their cultural legacy associates them with prostitution rather than the Corinthian spirit.

The other interesting aspect is the posturing and melodramatic morality which is invoked during these events by both participants and journalists. Carlos Tevez talks about what would happen "if they were Argentinian", but they already behave as if they are - or, at least, Sicilian. John Terry, after all, made love to Wayne Bridge's ex-girlfriend, not his wife or current girlfriend.

I lived through the height of the "permissive society", the couple of decades between the pill and AIDS. I was fairly frequently in a sports changing room in which there was more than one team mate who had had sex with the same lady. At a city party in the 1980s my wife once asked the host to name the women in the room he hadn't slept with; his eyes slowly surveyed the room before he said, "Well, there's you . . . . ". We didn't make much of these things or talk of "love rats". And we certainly didn't cry, which everybody in this story is said to have done at some stage. Women were assumed to have options and to be capable of making decisions in the same way as men.

Whereas in the curious milieu of the super-rich lower classes these things become bound up with public insults, public symbolism and public debate. It's a kind of playground medievalism, more like Arthur, Lancelot and Guinevere than the modern English upper classes. It lacks the kind of discretion which was exercised so well by the latter. We never had to put up with KING SHOULD GET HIS HANDS OFF COUNTESS SAYS EARL when Edward VII was on the rampage or MACMILLAN: BOOTHBY IS LOVE RAT.

It is not as if La Perroncel has much of a reputation for her men-at-arms (or feet) to defend: she is at least four years older than any of the other protagonists in this drama and has been associated, inter alia, with five other Chelsea players. And there, I must admit, I have the same snobbish reflexes as most other people. A lingerie model who puts it about a bit is a slapper, but an English literature lecturer (and there were some in my generation who were just as promiscuous as Mlle. Perroncel) is a jolly interesting girl who is likely to crop up on a lot of BBC discussion programmes. Yet the most extraordinary feature of this medieval playground morality is that John Terry has chiefly been castigated for what he’s done to Wayne Bridge rather than for what he’s done to Mrs. Terry and to his own children.

Which brings me to the final question: does any of this matter? These are not good people, but they aren't really evil either. Much worse happens in literary circles: remember Arthur Koestler, who certainly walked into Michael Foot's house in 1951 and raped his wife, Jill Craigie. He is suspected of multiple unreported rapes and of bullying his healthy 55-year-old wife into committing suicide with him.

I have presented the football saga as a mere prurient sociological curiosity, but as a consequentialist and utilitarian I do think there is one disturbing aspect. Who sleeps with whom doesn't really matter very much, but children being brought up by two parents who love them does. The people involved in these ménages are very few in number; even within professional football there are lots of ordinary, decent guys. Terry, Bridge & co. are a bad thing for society insofar as they provide role models that people aspire to. And they might be a good thing insofar as they provide an entertaining cautionary tale: all that money and they still end up in tears.

Lincoln Allison is Emeritus Reader in Politics at the University of Warwick and Visiting Professor of Sport and Leisure at the University of Brighton. His two most recent books are The Global Politics of Sport and The Disrespect Agenda: How the Wrong Kind of Niceness is Making us Weak and Unhappy. He is also the author of Amateurism in Sport.

Late one day, I staggered into the dining room of the Palace Hotel, an imposing Habsburg-style edifice in the Croatian capital Zagreb. It was November 1994, at the height of the war in neighbouring Bosnia, a struggle in which Croatia was heavily and controversially involved. The streets were full of soldiers and policemen. It was dark, and I was tired after a long journey. The elderly man and his wife finishing their meals rang a vague bell, but I had no idea who they were when we fell into conversation while I waited for my food. I told them that I was thinking of writing a critique of British appeasement of ethnic cleansing in Bosnia. What, the old man asked, was I planning to call the book. "Guilty Men", I answered. I thought that my interlocutor started slightly, and his wife's jaw began to drop. So did the penny. "I didn't catch your name", I continued. "Michael Foot" came back the reply - I was in the presence not only of the late former Labour leader, but also of the man who, together with Frank Owen of the Standard and Peter Howard of the Daily Express, had penned the original Guilty Men under the nom de plume of Cato in 1940.

This Left Book Club best-seller became the best known critique of Chamberlain's policy of appeasement of Nazi Germany and has spawned many imitations. My own was eventually published in 2001 under the title of Unfinest Hour; Foot attended the London launch at the University of Westminster.

We were both attending a meeting of the Croatian Pen Club, designed primarily to generate support for a country which was still very much in the sights of the Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic and his paramilitary proxies. The event was held in a very large hall, filled to capacity with local intellectuals, politicians, military men and members of the public.

Foot's own lecture was a tour de force, more of a patriotic harangue in which he urged Croats to free their homeland, but at the same time not to betray the Bosnians – on whom the Croatian President Tudjman had turned the year before. "You will win", he told a rapt audience, his frail frame shaking with fervour yet choosing every word carefully. At the time, this seemed a vain hope: one-third of the country was under direct military occupation by Serb militias; two-thirds of Bosnia had been taken by the forces of Ratko Mladic; and the prospect of western military intervention still seemed remote.

Yet within nine months, Foot had been proved right. By their own efforts, with some US logistical support, the Croatians re-unified their country and made a decisive contribution to ending the Bosnian war as well.

I always thought of that weekend when I later came across Foot's political career. His stance on the former Yugoslavia, of course, was of a piece with his opposition to appeasement. It also fitted with his principled support for Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher's decision to use military force to recapture the Falklands from the occupying forces of the Argentine military dictatorship. This cannot have been easy for Foot, because he was diametrically opposed to the Prime Minister on almost every other issue, and he also had a particularly rebarbative left wing of the party to deal with. But whatever else he was, Foot was not a pacifist and he held his ground. He remained a staunch enemy of tyranny of any sort, whether of the right (as in Latin America) or of the left in Soviet-dominated eastern Europe; after some hesitation, he even came around to NATO.

All this made his other foreign policy stances somewhat inexplicable, however. It is not surprising that he should have attacked rearmament in the 1935 election, and even supported unilateral disarmament for a while in the 1930s. That was very much in the air at the time, and Foot famously repented of it in 1940. It is much more surprising to find him opposing West German re-armament before 1955, and his support for the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament; both policies would if implemented have severely weakened the defence of democracy in Britain.

Foot also lost the Labour whip for a while because he opposed additional spending on the RAF in March 1961. And in 1983, by now leader of the Labour party, Foot presided over an election manifesto based on unilateral disarmament and other policies so unrealistic that the document was famously described as the "longest suicide note in history".

These positions cannot be reconciled, and so we must see them in the round. Michael Foot was undoubtedly a failure as leader of the opposition, but he brought to British politics an integrity which even his worst enemies recognised. He was not entirely consistent, but he was always sincere. Many of his policies were wrong, but he was right on most of the most important things. The French communist leader Georges Marchais once said that communism had been globalement positif in historical terms. It is a judgment which posterity is much more likely to make on Foot. He will be deeply missed.

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.

In 1868, the British Liberal Sir William Harcourt remarked that intervention was

a high and summary procedure that can sometimes snatch a remedy beyond the reach of law. As in the case of revolution, its essence is its illegality and its justification and its justification is its success.

We were talking about an invasion of another country, a change in the government of that country, and in those circumstances, it did seem to me that we ought to follow the safest route.

Nobody seems to have asked the obvious question: "Safest for whom?" Certainly not for the millions of Iraqis who rejoiced in Saddam's downfall and who have endorsed his removal by large majorities in all post-war polls (the only country in the world, incidentally, where this is the case). Decisions about whether or how to remove a terrible dictator, who had not only launched unprovoked attacks on two neighbouring states, but also continued to inflict extensive human rights abuses on his own population, cannot be decided by international law alone.

They would do well to note the response of the distinguished Philip Allott, retired Professor of International Law at Cambridge. While not necessarily endorsing the invasion himself, he judges that the Iraq war was neither lawful, nor unlawful. Allott continues:

It is wrong to suppose that the so-called legality of such a thing can finally be determined as if it were a civil or criminal wrong in national law.

it is wrong to suppose that the legality of a particular war can be finally determined by a few words in those masterworks of cynicism, dishonesty and opportunism known as Security Council resolutions.

In this context, it would be useful to know what the confidential legal opinion on the Kosovo intervention of 1999 was. Some senior international lawyers, such as Ian Brownlie, argued passionately at the time that the use of massive aerial force to compel Slobodan Milosevic to desist from his policies in Kosovo was a violation of state sovereignty, grievously compounded by the absence of a UN mandate (this was blocked by the Russians and Chinese on the Security Council).

What, one wonders, would have happened had that intervention gone awry? It very nearly did: nearly seventy days, not the 48 hours NATO had hoped, were required to bring Milosevic to heel. The cost would have been enormous: millions of Kosvovar refugees would have been permanently homeless; Macedonia might well have collapsed under the strain; Albania, Greece and possibly even Turkey might have been dragged into the conflict; and NATO holed below the waterline. These scenarios were endlessly rehearsed at the time. The resulting witchhunt would no doubt have unmasked a clique of liberal interventionists determined to nail the Serbian leader, who had bent international law in order to manoeuvre him into a corner at the Rambouillet conference.

These charges - in circulation at the time and since - have never gained traction, largely because the intervention was ratified by success. A independent committee of experts pronounced soon after the end of hostilities that the operation had perhaps not been legal, but that it was certainly legitimate. So we see once again the truth of the old adage.

Treason doth never prosper.

What's the reason?

Why if it prospers, none dare call it treason.

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.

Karl Kraus once famously said that pre-First World War Vienna was a "laboratory for world destruction". He meant the crackpot racial and political theories that had been circulating in Vienna since the 1890s: the social utopias and dystopias, the nihilism.

The characters in Ferdinand Bruckner's Pains of Youth, mostly Viennese medical undergraduates thrown together in lodgings - are engaged on a more modest project of self-destruction. "Hell", as the title of Sartre's shattering play tells us, "is the others". As the obiter dicta fly across the room, and the mind-games multiply, the atmosphere of futility becomes oppressive. "Everyone should shoot themselves at seventeen", remarks the aristocratic Desiree (Lydia Wilson) a particularly jaded twenty-something. The villainous Freder (Geoffrey Steitfeild), whose "studies" consist of experimenting with human nature, opines that while "some people use their helplessness to protect them...basically we're all the same: pitiful bastards".

Alt (Jonah Russell), a disgraced doctor who has served time for putting a terminally ill child out of its misery, believes not only that "clinging to others is weak", but that "Everyone needs an opportunity to visit the emotional toilet". And there is more: sex, drugs, prostitution (which the innocent maid Lucy enters into at Freder's suggestion), woman on woman violence (Marie ties her love-rival Irene to the sofa by her hair), lesbianism (between Marie and Desiree), and masochism (Marie's demand to be beaten). I am sure this list is not exhaustive. By the time the curtain has fallen, the actual death count of one - Desiree commits suicide - seems miraculously low.

Most analyses of the play see it as part of a broader expressionist wrestling with the devastating legacy of World War One, in which German and Austrian youth had been decimated and emasculated. The Guardian's Michael Billington picked up this theme when he wrote of "a forensic analysis of a doomed, death-haunted generation". There is something in this: the play emerged out of the immediate aftermath of the war, and Freder's amoral, parasitic and dominatory streak may have been an allusion to the growth of fascism. It would be surprising after all, if a play set in the crumbling former Habsburg capital were completely uninterested in its political, historical and cultural issues.

The problem is that the play makes no overt reference to war, politics or even the ethnic diversity which so characterised contemporary Vienna. If the war, in which the older protagonists would have served, had mattered so much to Bruckner, he would surely have alluded to it in some way; one cannot explain everything through silence. The play could quite easily be transferred to another country and even era. The plot and the characters are really rather timeless.

On the other hand, to read Pains of Youth, as this performance seems to, as a critique of bourgeois society is not wrong. "Bourgeois existence or suicide. There are no other choices. It's not remotely a joke," Desiree laments and her subsequent decision to take her own life shows that she is deadly earnest.

But the politics of Pains of Youth are a great deal more complex than that. At the start of the play, the aspirant Marie - a hard-working lower middle class student from Passau who is about to graduate as a qualified medic– is the central character, but by the end it is unmistakably Freder. "When the right moment comes", he announces, "one should consciously embrace bourgeois existence". This, Freder later elaborates, is the only way to "avoid catastrophe". The message may be unpalatable, almost unbearable, but it is none the less true for that. "None of you can live without me. If no one takes control you're all of you lost", Freder says in the variant ending, and we know he is right.

Here one is reminded of Richard Yates's April Wheeler in Revolutionary Road. In the recent screen version, Kate Winslet's April commits suicide as a quasi-rational protest against the banality of suburban life. In the novel, on the other hand, Yates is clear that April is just mentally unwell, a condition aggravated but not fundamentally caused by the banality of 1950s suburban America, and that her gesture is not tragic but pointless. Likewise, when Marie contemplates taking her life in solidarity with Desiree, Freder dissuades her: "One way or another, life goes on". If that is so, and it is, then Bruckner's bleak work shows not so much the futility of bourgeois life, as the futility of trying to escape it.

The author thanks Miss Katie Jenner for her assistance in writing this review.

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.

The Pope is usually good news for journalists. Reporting his pronouncements does not require research or much leg work, and his recent attack on the Equality Bill going through the House of Lords was a gift for those columnists who did not wish to leave their firesides to write their articles for the Sunday papers. The issue of whether the Catholic Church, the Church of England and various Protestant churches should be free to make decisions when employing someone on the basis of that person's faith or lifestyle made good if predictable copy.

The House of Lords debate in committee was also good fun, with impressive contributions from the Bishop of Winchester and Rabbi Julia Neuberger (even though she subsequently appeared to be asleep), and included a terse observation from Norman Tebbit that the choice was "whether we walk in the fear of the Lord or the fear of Brussels" - he was quite clear which way he was walking! The Bill reproduces some of the language in the European Union Employment Framework Directive, and it would be hard not to see the Bill as a response to a diktat from Brussels, were it not that Harriet Harman gives the impression that she would be introducing it even without any prompting from the E.U.

There is, interestingly, no definition of what is a religion, and since "belief" is also a label to use, it may be presumed that any cult, however, weird or pernicious, is entitled to protection.

The Equality Commission already has the power to issue a three year plan for its activities, it should do research, issue publications on equality and diversity and can issue notices to employers and others that an "unlawful act" has been committed with instructions for what has to be done. A person can enter into an agreement with the Commission on action to be taken in relation to such a notice, and entering into such an agreement is not to be considered an admission of having committed an offence. This sounds similar to what a person is told when given a Fixed Penalty Notice for shoplifting: it does not count as a criminal conviction and the person is told this. What people are not told is that records are kept of fixed penalties and when someone wants an enhanced criminal record check to be done, or in future when they apply to the vetting and barring agency (the Independent Safeguarding Authority) for a certificate the details resurface.

The effect of the Commission's notices is bound to be that guilt is in effect decided behind closed doors, with people too frightened to challenge the interpretation put on a situation by an all-powerful authority. Going to court, unless someone feels very strongly, is not worth the risk.

Most job application forms these days for any sizeable organization have a form demanding the application to state his or her "ethnicity". By ethnicity the questionnaires very obviously means colour. Those who design the questions are not interested in anything very subtle. There are options such as "White British", "Irish" (the Welsh are usually omitted, much to their disgust), "Black", "White Other", "Asian".

Nowadays it has penetrated the questioners' heads that it may be wise to split "Black" into "Black African" and "Black Caribbean", and to split the "Asian" category: they have realized that certain groups just do not like each other very much and do not wish to be identified together. The intention, however, remains a crude one of identifying not ethnicity but colour. There is no such ethnic group as "white". I usually deal with such forms by ticking the "other" box and scrawling over it something like "I do not label myself in this way", leaving those who would like to come and see me with a colour coding chart to do so. The question is offensive. It implies that we are all stuck in the 1960s, in the days when Wole Soyinka wrote his poem The Telephone Conversation, in which a landlady asked him on the telephone "Are you dark...or very light?"

I do not myself believe that it is possible to create a working or social environment in which there is respect unless we are all allowed to forget about colour and differences. No one is likely to change the way they think about other people because of some commission bullying them.

The Commission would like to see all organizations with more than 250 employees instituting "diversity training". We were subjected to this when I was working at the Crown Prosecution Service, and dire it was too. Everyone was forced to spend an entire day looking at case studies of imaginary situations, none of which seemed to bear much relationship to our own experience. Given the workload on our desks and the expense of withdrawing staff to take part in such an exercise, it seemed a waste of time. The danger is too that when someone from an "ethnic minority" in any office turns out to be lazy or incompetent, but unapproachable and prickly, someone who gives every indication that he will "play the race card", then management will steer clear of that person and a bad situation will be allowed to fester.

Another danger may be that no one will want to get close to a "diverse" colleague. Communication between colleagues becomes stilted and inhibited by the fear of causing offence. Someone may find himself isolated at work: colleagues are far too nervous to invite him to the pub at lunchtime.

The Government insists that the Equality Bill it is now pushing through the House of Lords is only a consolidating bill. I do not agree. The Bill introduces the concept of "positive action" in relation to employment (Sections 157 and 158). Employers who are faced with two potential employees who are equally qualified for a job may decide to employ the person who is from a disadvantaged group just on the basis of a characteristic like race or gender, yet should not have a policy of always treating people with that characteristic more favourably than others. This is vague, and the Government insist that it is permissive and imposes no obligation on the employer, but the provisions are a cause for concern when taken with all the monitoring that is going on, and the way in which the Commission, behind closed doors, will be setting targets for employers. If the section were to be of no effect, it would not be in the Bill and the Government would not be seeking so hard to promote it.

The Commission has been busily putting out briefing notes for MPs and members of the House of Lord. Its Parliamentary briefing, "Positive Action", says

Positive action is a tool available in law to help achieve greater diversity, allowing employers to target training and encouragement at under-represented groups.

Yet the Conservative party seems to be stuck like rabbits in the headlights. There is not the opposition we might have expected. Lord Hunt of Wirral said in the House of Lords that

a clause which allows a decision to be made on a protected characteristic for a legitimate reason is very sensible,

The Minister for Equality, Michael Foster MP, is reported as saying that "churches should be lining up their lawyers in anticipation", which perhaps is an indication of the glee of other secularists in Parliament. I fear that it is not only the churches who can anticipate trouble. The council strapped for cash anxious to find the best possible deal for its rubbish collection, the barristers' chambers trying to recruit the best pupil without finding themselves the subject of litigation, the medium sized business anxious to deal fairly when recruiting staff but finding that the deprived area where their business is sited only produces feckless and illiterate applicants - all may have problems. The keeping of records about the ethnicity of staff already has a deleterious effect on the relationships between work colleagues. This Bill is only going to increase resentment and put back by another decade the emergence of the colour blind society many of us would like to live in. The Bill is in effect a licence to discriminate.

Jan Davies has been practising as a solicitor in the criminal courts for over 20 years. She was a founder member of Reading Solicitors Chambers and between 2001 and March 2007 was a senior crown prosecutor in Oxfordshire. She now practises as an advocate in both magistrates and crown courts as an associate member of Reading Solicitors Chambers. She is the author of The Criminal Advocate's Survival Guide (Carbolic Smokeball Company, 2007).

Sam Tanenhaus's book is a short, sweeping and vigorous denunciation of the Republican party's capitulation to its dissident redneck and revanchist tendencies (often these are combined, but not always). Instead of attending to the unelectable refuseniks of "movement" Republicanism, the author thinks America's right should have worked with its other great tradition: an authentic Burkean conservatism which understands the real nature of government. A note of caution: Sam Tanenhaus never tells us where his own political sympathies lie, but he never evinces any liking for the right except (and then only tacitly) where it is of a Disraeli, Baldwin or Macmillan stamp. In short, for all we know he might be a socialist with a bad case of Tory-envy.

There's some anger in The Death of Conservatism, and it is directed toward the movement which is accused of disliking the most of the Republican party, The Establishment, the "liberal elite", the US government and every thing it professes to stand for: American society. You may say that Sam Tanenhaus disapproves of Tory purism and likes Tory compromises. But he also assumes - as his title sort of implies - that (p. 4):

this moment's emerging revitalised liberalism has illuminated a truth that should have been apparent a decade ago; movement conservatism is not merely in retreat; it is outmoded.... [Especially in the realm of] ideas and argument [it is] glaringly disconnected from the realities now besetting America.

Obituaries for conservatism are premature
Of course conservatism isn't dead, and even Mr Tanenhaus accepts that it succeeded "in vanquishing all other rival political creeds until it was itself vanquished in the election of 2008". In actuality, conservatism is never vanquished: if it's out of power or fashion, it's merely biding its time. Indeed Mr Tanenhaus believes only that conservatism faces wilderness years, as (he argues) all political movements do from time to time.

I don't doubt that the Republican party and many conservative voices are making a mess of things at the moment. But I do rather admire conservatism - its ideas and impulses - and especially want to promote the sort of conservatism Mr Tanenhaus doesn't like. I suggest that it still has a lot of awkward life which Big Government conservatism needs to accommodate.

Just as I like the unpopular forms of British conservatism, I am interested in what most educated people think are unpalatable Republican prejudices - some of them intellectual and some of them visceral. And I am less than completely keen on the Disraelian fudges which conservatives have to adopt if they want to govern in the US or the UK.

There are lots of differences between the conservatisms of either side of the Atlantic but Tanenhaus in particular reminds us of a feature they share (p. 9):

…. no president in modern times, Democrat or Republican, has seriously attempted to reduce the size of government, and for good reason: voters don't want it reduced. What they want is government that's "big" for them.

The US is rightwing
In several ways, the UK and the US are worlds apart and not least because Democrats - let alone Republicans of whatever stripe - are well to the right of anything in the mainstream UK. So President Obama's health reforms look like socialism to many Americans, including many Democrats. The system of compulsory health insurance Obama is proposing would seem to most Britons including plenty of Tories like the wholesale destruction of an indispensable part of the social contract.

The heart of the difference between the two polities is that Americans have a much higher regard for self-reliance than the British. This produces the secondary effect, crucial to politics, that Americans are much more wary of the state than the British. In particular, Americans are quite inclined to believe that the federal state can't directly do much good and that every person and institution ought to fight the temptation to let it try. It is an oddity that this thought is shared by many Democrats.

I can't imagine that many Americans would share the general British assumption that one should take all one can get from the state on the basis that one's paid for it. What's more, Americans might find it odd how many rather right-wing working class British people would express this thought as sharply as their Labour-supporting compatriots.

What's more, it is easy to frighten almost any American with the idea of imposing a Welfare State on them and it is easy to frighten almost any Briton with the idea of robbing them of theirs. I am inclined to argue that both countries are the victim of some powerful misunderstandings, and in the American case these may amount to a sort of False Consciousness. The point is of course that the Americans could organise health services better without falling into Communism and that the British could dismantle the Welfare State without falling into a free-for-all.

It happens that I am not remotely self-reliant, but I do strongly admire the quality in others. I am drawn to the intellectual and moral right of the thoughtful and moral right-wings, and think a country - a society - that could cultivate and live these ideas would do well and better than ours where they have been abandoned. So I am drawn to the American way of thinking.

Over forty years ago, I did dimly see that the US were right to admire self-reliance more than we did. I used to the thrill to the occasional appearances of the very clever right-winger William Buckley on British television. He was patrician and sardonic in a very civilized way. His confidence - and his attractiveness even to the ur-liberal BBC - said something about the differences between America and Britain. He was a very dry martini, but was accepted here as a major figure without demur. He wasn't an Enoch Powell; he made the dark side attractive, which Powell - a clever and thoughtful man - could never quite do.

At about that time, I was reading about the Republican star and nearly-man Barry Goldwater. He was supposed to be frightening and I duly shivered. Only recently have I found out enough about Goldwater to find him fascinating, not least from a collection of his writing, Pure Goldwater.

I knew, back in the 60s, that John F Kennedy (the war-mongering Democrat hero) was not half as useful as most people thought, and that Lyndon Johnson (Democrat fixer, bruiser and social reformer) was far more so.

In short I had some of the normal half-educated prejudices of the English, but not all of them. I was a right-winger of sorts, but guided by rather conventional prejudices.

Years later, I have spent a bit of time in the US and talked to a good many people there. I have met (for instance) multi-millionaire Democrats and Republicans on the Upper East Side and in Fort Worth, and struggling country people in the Colorado and Washington State, and plenty more besides, and came away with the conviction that it was a mistake to think they had very close parallels back home.

I have been struck by the difficulties that even experienced English liberals have with modern America. Stephen Fry, Justin Webb and Simon Schama all seem to me to have come unstuck, and in much the same way. Their commentary likes much of the theory and experience of America, but seems to hold its nose about too much that matters. They love America, but like Frasier Crane or Edith Wharton or Henry James (and maybe Sam Tanenhaus), they can't help feeling that America ought to be a little more like Europe.

They seem to trip over the great difference between the US and the UK, which is that the average American does feel that people's sufferings and failings are to a marked degree their own problem and maybe their own fault too. They are not their brother's keeper and not keen on the state trying to be. In most misery, self-indulgence will be at work. In most attempts to alleviate suffering, there is a profound danger of moral hazard.

Not all Americans feel these impulses equally, but to a degree which surprises a Briton, almost all Americans believe in these tenets even when they conflict with their own self interest or their own philosophical bent. In short, Americans are right wing in the sense that they are not liberal in the European sense, and that includes many on the "left" of politics, if that is indeed what it means to be within the Democrat fold but to its right.

False consciousness in modern politics
Of course, there's great muddle in all this. The American left likes unions, big federal welfare programmes and pork, but has to accommodate the pioneer and prairie morality. The American right likes entrepreneurship, state powers and federal pork, but is deeply riven as to how much of the modern Big State it must live with.

It is only a slight complication that William Buckley used to say (as Tanenhaus reminds us) that he knew what a liberal (in the American sense) was, but not what a conservative was. Presumably he knew that the left wanted more state spending, more welfare and more egalitarianism. But the right was all over the place. It's true, and the point of Tanenhaus's book. The question for the right in the US and in the UK too is whether its internal divisions can become creative rather than poisonous.

When I watch Fox News, or to vox pops with Tea Party-goers on C-Span, I warm to the moral impulses that seem to be lurking even in the stridency of many of the opinions. I like to think that when the American right rails against the Welfare State, it isn't merely a selfish cry (it is that too) but also a howl of outrage that no-one seems to understand that the left is a large, self-serving conspiracy of unions, professions and officials as they plunder the citizen in the name of doing good. This form of right-wingery does indeed want a change, and is a change backwards, a reversion to a past before America's ideals were stolen by liberal thieves.

The oddity of the American right is that its anti-state views are held most vociferously by the unprivileged. It is entirely possible to argue that the right contains many decent people who have little chance of upward mobility, whose income has stagnated as the very rich got even richer, and whose welfare critically depends on a large and even an expanding state apparatus. It is an enduring miracle to many on the left and some on the right that America is a place where there is a good deal of false consciousness, denial and cognitive dissonance.

Obviously, I liked and like brainy right-wingery. That's the easy bit. But I think we ignore the moral quality of people who aren't obviously thoughtful. I think that even in the apparently "nasty" right-wingery of the not-very thoughtful right, there is often a moral sense of real and under-rated value. I think that is especially true in the US where patriotism and national myth lead to an idealism which can be called right-wing. For historical reasons, socialism in the US always seemed to threaten the national myth, whilst in the UK a soft socialism has come to embody the national story. In the US the left can never quite trump the national myth whilst in the UK - as result of Whig History and much else - the triumph of the left has seemed almost like the smooth unfolding of historic trends.

Of course neither the US nor the UK has an immutable settlement. The US will presumably one day find a way of using its state to ordain rather than deliver more welfare and the UK will presumably one day dismantle the state’s hegemony over social services. The US will get over its terror that all innovation leads to Stalin and the UK will get over its fear that all innovation leads to vicious chaos. What's more, these will be the core battles between left and right in both countries. In effect both countries will be working out how to get out from under a socialist thrall.

Living with the visceral right
It's a big part of Tanenhaus's work to try to describe and even resolve the row within the right of the US. He is right to say that the revanchist right of the Republican party makes it unelectable. But I think he rather misses how important it is for the Big Government Right to accommodate the visceral American desire to enshrine self-reliance at the heart of the public ethos. There are echoes here in the UK of course. UK Tories are divided about how far to go in stressing that the country needs to rediscover the self-reliance which three or four generations have abandoned. In short, in the US and the UK the right is divided as to how much both countries can be more American, and less socialist.

For what it's worth, I don't suppose Sarah Palin's Tea Party and redneck credentials will or ought to take her to the candidacy of the Republican party or to the Presidency. But I do suppose that some Republican leader, sometime, needs to find a way of accommodating Mr Tanenhaus's Big Government Disraelians with the loud discontent of America's populist right, even when they seem revanchist, dim and unelectable.

Mr Cameron's problem looks different. Authentic, right-wing Toryism is a problem to Mr Cameron because it has become furtive, fugitive and even feral. He probably thinks that a slimmer state is right for our society, but he doesn't have people with jeeps, jeans and rifles calling for it.

Both the US and the UK have intellectual "purist" right-wingers and they make sense to a decent minority of intellectuals. But in the US, the politically viable right has to work out what to do about a vociferous visceral populist right. Mr Cameron has decided there is no such problem or opportunity here. I hope he's wrong.

Richard D. North is the author of Mr Cameron's Makeover Politics: Or Why Old Tory Stories Matter to Us All.

A child hunkered down in a cellar in a war in Lebanon gets to reading and thinking about the world. He later becomes a financial trader. He cooks up an interest in uncertainty, as well he might, given his birthplace and profession, and after years of further research produces this book on risk which sells zillions of copies and is hailed, for instance, as "hugely enjoyable…" (Financial Times). Many of the most enthusiastic reviewers are the authors of rather similar books about tipping points, nudges, outliers, long tails, the wisdom of crowds, blinks and all the other pocket nostrums which in a catchy kind of way sum everything up, ready to be dunked in a latte in Starbucks.

Whenever I get a flash of that boy, living in what I imagine and he describes as a civilised society, and his adult incarnation of those values, I like Mr Taleb. But in the end, nothing stopped this book being an irritating bore.

Mr Taleb's book does do some valuable work, especially for those perplexed by bits of statistical thinking. But there is one important thing it doesn't do. The Black Swan tells you next to nothing about its sub-title, "The impact of the highly improbable" and that does rather matter. The book is also close to unreadable, being rich in childish prejudices (the French and all politicians are silly, etc) and infantile jokes. As a reviewer, I usually feel obliged to read every word of a book before discussing it. This time, I confess, with about 50 percent certainty, that I read about 80 percent of this book, with random dippings in the bits I couldn't face dragging my eye over line by line. (Mr Taleb says we overstate the certainty with we assess uncertainty, so my guesses may be out a bit.)

In the matter of human height, for example, this normalising doesn't matter. Outliers are rare and an occasional 8-footer wouldn't make much difference to our sense of the norm. Mr Taleb invents a world called Mediocristan to capture this reliable world.

But it does matter, says Mr Taleb (and this is the not bad bit of his argument), that statisticians and other experts in discussing risk have privileged and promoted the normal, average sort of event as if it were universal. Indeed, they have gone further and reified the average. Thus, there is lots of discussion of how events "regress to the norm", an idea which is captured by the "bell curve". This graph expresses the idea that (like human height, say) most phenomena cluster round a normal sort of a number, with extremes (of shortness and tallness) becoming fewer at both ends and in any case lost in the crowd. But a casual reading of statistics does indeed (as Mr Taleb suggests) does give the impression that the norm is almost sucking outliers toward itself, as though by magnetism or gravity.

Another of Mr Taleb's strengths is to remark that it is a mistake to think we can measure uncertainty. It is, after all, what we don't know. And yet, of course, we are often told about the chances of a Chernobyl or a jumbo crashing on a football stadium as though there was much chance of knowing such a thing. Not that we seem to mind as much as the scaredy-custards like to pretend. We know some stuff about such nuclear and air accidents as we've had, and it's not enough to put most people off living near nuclear power stations or driving (which we know to be more dangerous than flying).

The difficulty for Mr Taleb is that much of even this less-travelled territory has been better-charted before. The best book in this field that I know is the late Peter Bernstein's 1996 Against the Gods, which has most of Mr Taleb's strengths and none of his weaknesses.

The worst of these failings is that even at his best Mr Taleb is setting up straw man arguments. I don't think the average is quite the tyrant Mr Taleb paints it, nor does a betting shop punter think his bets are scientific.

Anyway. Lots of phenomena, as Mr Taleb rightly says, are not amenable to "bell curve" type thinking. Some of them are plain erratic, whilst others are "scaleable". As one example of the latter sort of event, he cites Google; as another, he cites authorship. A Google, or a Taleb, is in a winner-takes-all sort of world (dubbed Extremistan). Each of us needs only one search engine and very few striking new ideas. The essence of these phenomena is that one way or another, they achieve a sort of critical mass of success which tends to crowd out competition. (This has been even more the case - not for much longer I suspect - with Microsoft, which Mr Taleb doesn't discuss.) Not only do most of us only need one operating system, but we find automatic - and very real - merit in the one everyone else is using even if it isn't very good.

Even Mr Taleb admits that these examples are flawed, not least because (as "long tail" theory predicts) the kind of world which produces a quick Google, say, can as soon produce a not-Google. Rather similarly, as he reluctantly admits, whilst there are enviable authors who become huge stars, there are plenty of others who gain a good deal of esteem (or at least self-esteem) and even a bit of an income without ever becoming huge successes. Indeed, the technologies which produce huge concentrations of success are the self-same technologies which widen opportunity. Anyone can post a song on YouTube. And so far as I know more books are published than ever before, and by people more able to self-promote than was once the case.

Suppose for the moment that humans do underestimate the exceptional. Mr Taleb claims a special modernity for the effect. He says that evolutionary psychology dictates that brains designed for the boring savannah can't assess exciting technological risks. I don't see this. Frankly, I imagine the primitive world to have been more full of nasty surprises than ours because - say - the sudden eruption of a nearby earthquake might be very unexpected to someone who had not read of the worldwide existence of earthquakes. Indeed, the modern world is characterised by a sort of jumpiness which flows, paradoxically, from its routine placidity. Black Swans are getting rarer and less important.

Mr Taleb makes some elementary mistakes. He says, or instance and typically, that modernity makes hurricanes worse as unexpected events because their impact is so much more expensive than used to be the case. But actually, the rich world can surf disaster much more easily than poor societies. Having an expensive disaster can be like having much less of one.

Mr Taleb shirks the crucial tasks he might have been quite good at. The essence of this lacuna is that we get no serious discussion about the nature or seriousness of Black Swans. For instance, Mr Taleb says that "in the modern environment" (presumably in Vietnam, Lebanon, Iraq - the Middle East more generally - and Afghanistan) "wars last longer and kill more people than is typically planned". Is that any truer than it ever was? I’' have thought the mess of war is hardly a surprise.

In what sense is war ever a Black Swan? I should have thought that mankind is seldom surprised by the outbreak of war, as a generality. Tony Blair might have thought in the late 1990s that an age of peace had dawned. But did anyone else much share that view? Mr Bush and Mr Blair might have thought that the second Iraq war would be easy. Surely the majority view was that they were wrong? Indeed, Donald Rumsfeld (who was at least very funny) said that the big problem wasn't what you didn't know, but what you didn't know you didn't know. That might have been a Taleb remark, and suggests that some of those who have to wrangle Black Swans do know the nature of the beast's unknowability.

Let's take some Black Swans Mr Taleb might have anatomised. So far as I remember, nothing about the First World War was widely predicted and especially not the scale of its technological slaughter. Similarly no-one predicted the imagineering which the Nazis wrought on the German mind with the tools of modern mass entertainment. No-one foresaw that a few disaffected middle class Islamists could conceive of using airliners as suicide bombs in a classic terrorist ploy rendered infinitely more powerful by its theatrical audacity. Then there are the Black Swans nature lobs at us: 'flu epidemics, and HIV AIDS, say. But none of these are discussed by Mr Taleb.

My point is that even if we discussed them into the ground we might not be any the wiser. So the point may be that the impact of Black Swans - the book's main subject remember - is that they are just the same old same-old.

Thinking about them doesn't help. One would always be fighting the last Black Swan whilst a new one was fluffing up its wings, by definition out of sight.

Mr Taleb says somewhere that you can't know when a Black Swan is on its way. That raises interesting questions when we consider, in particular, the cataclysmic things which are widely predicted. Neither the Population nor the H bombs have yet sunk us. Will climate change? Something so advertised and pre-announced can't be a Black Swan, except perhaps by being completely different to our present predictions for it. Frankly, that's one of the reasons I take climate change with a pinch of salt. It's not that I think it'll be damp squib. Rather, I think it will be full of surprises, as will our responses to it. I think it might weird because I think the future is always weird.

The future is also often fairly predictable, Black Swans and all. (Of course it isn't predictable by us: I mean it turns out to have been consistent with historical trends.) For example, capitalism has, so far, always produced crashes and yet very few people predict their arrival (though there are usually people acknowledged to be clever who loudly foretell them and profit from them).

The weird point here is that one of the main responses to Black Swans seems to be "So what?". For all sorts of reasons, the cataclysm has always been survivable and the inevitability of (say) the next crash has limited impact on the present boom. Doesn't this suggest that people don't need Mr Taleb's book not merely because it says rather little but because even if he had tried to say more we would have shrugged and said that we knew it already? What's more, we think that making ourselves safer by investing in timidity (a welfare state, bankers’ bail-outs) is not necessarily a very effective strategy.

Life's weird, and littered with Black Swans, and yet, as Mr Taleb's despised French would say: plus ça change. All kinds of unimaginable things have happened and will go on happening. But lots of things stay the same. The French and Anglo-Saxons still talk about each other in the terms they found accurate five hundred years ago, and many of them, like Mr Taleb, still find the game killingly funny. For all that Black Swans are very important, they don't seem to make much difference to those who survive the disasters they sometimes bring. So far. Crossed fingers.

Richard D. North is the author of Rich is Beautiful: A Very Personal Defence of Mass Affluence.

This book is very nearly as interesting as its author and his many fans think it is. I am a tiny bit snitty only because Mr Gladwell pretends that we are mostly in the grip of a myth in which

the story line is always the same: our hero is born in modest circumstances and by virtue of his own grit and talent fights his way to greatness.

It is one of the merits of Outliers that it sees the power of this second analysis (though it rather disdains the process). But it is a failing to underplay the role of the first scenario, as though it were both stronger as an idea and wronger as a process than it is.

Another great strength of the book is that it isn't messianic. It is a little too nuanced to be hijacked by anything like a political agenda. It opens with a long account of Roseto, Pennsylvania, an isolated Italian community which managed to buck many American disease trends by remaining very highly Italian in its community ethos. But then - thank goodness - the book doesn't pursue the line that it "takes a village to raise a child". Still less does it suggest that great success springs from the communal. It happens that a little further Googling shows that this community has become much more "normal" (and less normative) in recent years. But in any case, its recipe for beating heart disease was not very relevant to Mr Gladwell's search for the wellsprings of individuals' success.

Almost all the stories he accumulates are riveting. Perhaps the best single example is the account of Bill Gates' early life. Widely seen as a driven nerd who is emotionally clunky, Bill Gates may have been those, but he was also well-placed to develop himself. He was at a good school when it happened to get a world-class computer and connections to an even better one at a university, and even as teenager he had developed skills (not least by devoting an extraordinary amount of time to getting them) that happened to suit some powerful and innovative people. What's more, he was interested in small personal computers at a time when few people were and just before (only partly because of his own efforts) they were about to become an enormous market force.

Mr Gladwell tells us many stories, and one way of looking at them is to see that Mr Gates embodies various criteria for success. Practice ("10,000 hours of practice"); lucky birth cohort; lucky market timing; and supportive parents are amongst them. He is at pains to cite evidence that

…. the people at the top don't just work harder or even much harder than everyone else. They work much, much harder.

Mr Gladwell loves to see very successful people as being very lucky and mostly in the way they are embedded in circumstances that do them proud. We meet immigrant Jewish garment workers whose work only seems mechanical: they are in an industry where the geography of success is clear even from the vantage point of machine-workers, if they are bright enough. In New York in the early 20th Century, many of them flourish because the means of production are cheap (a Singer or three) and the market for ready-mades is burgeoning.

Their children, or grandchildren, are well-placed in every way to become doctors and lawyers. As the latter, they flourished because they are outsiders prepared to facilitate hostile takeovers. It's an old story, really: Jews have historically been deployed to do financial dirty work by professional classes which have come to prefer to seem gentlemanly.

But Mr Gladwell draws on fascinating work on what its author, Geert Hofstede, calls "Cultural Dimensions": the ways (say) Swiss differ from (say) Colombians. But Mr Gladwell stresses, too, that cultural determinism is not all it seems. There are black and latino mothers across the US whose children thrive in the highly-disciplined school environment offered by the KIPP system, and that's contrary to a stereotype that got to be stubborn because it has been playing out pretty well (by which I mean, badly) for generations. KIPP's motto might have made a nice sub-title for Mr Gladwell: "Work hard. Be nice".

I think Mr Galdwell is in a bit of a muddle about cultural inheritance, and why shouldn't he be? I loved the evidence that societies strongly and stubbornly vary in their acceptance of and dependence on (variously) hierarchy, masculinity, individuality and certainty. Mr Gladwell notes how "honour societies" (in which families and clans bear murderous grudges) seem to have been imported to the US from Italy and Scotland (he might have added, from North Ireland, too). Their feuds were seen to be playing out a hundred years ago, and seem still to colour the behaviour of some young people from, for example, Kentucky. I have no idea how much stock to place in this hypothesising but do think that it is at odds with his other evidence that people (airline pilots, for instance) can be trained out of dangerous inculturation.

Never mind, all these stories are of great interest, and any of us can follow the leads Mr Gladwell lays out in clear references. So the great merit of the book is that whilst it does lay out a line of argument, it isn't monomanic, let alone dogmatic. It does suggest, but doesn't bang on about, various tricks societies and families might learn to help their young along.

Perhaps I like the book because very few of the solutions are socialistic. Sure, you need great schools and universities, and maybe they should be in part state-funded. But they needn't be hugely expensive (though Bill Gates benefited mightily from one which was well-wedged). Students need to work hard, and to have the time and encouragement to do so (in the case of the Beatles, Hamburg strip joints provided that apprenticeship). Paid work should be as meaningful as possible because that's a merit in itself, but also likely to provide people with a springboard (that's how the southern Chinese grow great rice on farms the size of an apartment, and became such a flourishing diaspora). People can use all kinds of devices to overcome the inhibitions of their background.

Samuel Smiles would have loved this book.

Richard D. North is the author of Rich is Beautiful: A Very Personal Defence of Mass Affluence.

This production of Molière's masterpiece of 1666 has, of course, attracted most attention because of its casting. Keira Knightley on stage! Rarely before can the drama pages of the broadsheets have been so anxiously scrutinised in sixth-form common rooms up and down the land. Hard luck on Damian Lewis, fine actor though he is, who in this context has been reduced to a merely incidental asset ("you know, that ginger-haired bloke who played Soames in the Forsyte Saga").

But this is clever, and not just eye-catching, casting on the part of the play's director, Thea Sharrock. In Molière's original version Alceste is to some degree overshadowed by Celimene, and resents the attentions she receives and bestows. The overshadowing of Lewis by Knightley in the press coverage parallels the plot of the play in a way which prepares the audience for the action - it is no surprise when the drama opens with Alceste/Damian Lewis bursting on stage in the most filthy of moods. Wouldn't you, in his shoes?

This off-stage/on-stage linkage also parallels the premiere of the play, when the actress who took the part of Celimene was Armande Béjart, Molière's estranged wife, and the playwright was rumoured to be having an affair with the actress playing Eliante, while at the same time preparing the ground for a future liaison with the actress who played Arsinoe. There must have been as much drama in the green room as in front of the audience.

Still, it is brave of Knightley to have taken on the role of Celimene, whom Martin Crimp has updated as Jennifer, a spoilt Hollywood starlet. More timid actresses might have seen satire, rather than compliment, in this invitation; a sort of back-handed reassurance along the lines of "Don't worry, darling, you'll barely have to act at all". So all the more credit to her for taking the part, in which she is exceptionally good.

Quit the city. Forget work. Turn our backs
on all of this. Begin to relax.
Just the two of us.
We can become anonymous.
We’ll buy a little house
With a garden - trees - a stream - whatever.
Then we could think about starting - don't you see - a
Family together.

Lewis is also a vivid physical presence, impatiently bestriding the cluttered stage. He seems to be perpetually on the brink of violence, and when it eventually erupts at the end of the play as he overturns a table, on the night I went he did so with such abandon that some of the stage properties ended up in the front row of the stalls. It was a particularly nice touch to see him, as he took his bow, glance inquiringly and mouth an apology towards the woman whose evening had suddenly taken an unexpected turn with the arrival of several plates and cups in her lap.

Crimp's version of the play is excellent. It would be wrong to call it a translation - it is much too free an updating of the French for that. But in its broadest conception - the transferral of the action to the modern world of celebrity - as well as in its verbal detail, it is wonderfully successful. Crimp is too wise not occasionally to employ some of the broader arts of the theatre. For instance, a deep guffaw went up when Alceste delivered this particular swipe against the complacency of modern theatre audiences:

People will speak highly of a pile of shit
if they've dressed up and spent fifty quid to see it.

Astute, too, was Crimp's decision to sharpen the ending. In Molière's original, Philinte and Eliante follow Alceste off stage and try to make him drop his plan to withdraw from society altogether. In Crimp's version, when John attempts to follow Alceste off-stage, protesting that "I'm worried about him", Ellen coolly has the last word:

Relax, John, just relax. Don't you see
we're better off without him.

David Womersley is Thomas Warton Professor of English Literature, University of Oxford. His previous reviews for the Social Affairs Unit can be read here.

While researching the background to the development of the Modern Olympics I came across a passage, written in 1887, in which Pierre de Coubertin extols the practice of caning in England:

To help you understand just how popular canes are, need I mention the case in which students revolted at one time because there was a question of banning the practice from their midst? Far from being considered ignominious, canings are deemed a competition in courage, the one undergoing the caning having to fight hard to hold back his tears or his cries.

At around the same time as I interviewed that headmaster I published a book on political philosophy which included a short defence of corporal punishment - largely on the grounds that it inhibited the free development of the pupil much less than more insidious forms of punishment. The publisher pleaded with me to leave it out. He said that it made me sound

like an old colonel standing at the end of the bar and braying that caning had never done him any harm.

The underlying assumption was that, of course, a teenage boy faced with the phenomenon of chairs with rubber stoppers on the bottoms of their legs would naturally wish to remove them and hurl them at the nearest figure in authority. But the institution would collapse unless this practice was disincentivised and the cheapest, most effective way of achieving this was a sharp, burning sensation in the buttocks. No stigma attached to being beaten: it was deterrence at its purest.

The personal gain has been lifelong. It starts with pain management; most of us are going to be in pain at some stage and it is good to be able to recognise and deal with mere pain (as opposed to pain which signals something worse).

The trick is . . . not minding that it hurts

From pain management develops a certain boldness for which I have always been grateful when dealing with censorious vice-chancellors or cocky policemen. What can they do, after all? - though serious criminals are a different matter. And from pain management develops stress management, including the ability to enjoy yourself even though you know unpleasant things are going to happen to you.

Spare the rod and spoil the child

But Elias and his followers are keen to point out that civilisation is not good in itself, it is merely a different style, marked by sqeamishness rather than a real ethics. Men cease to beat their wives in the public context of the market square, but the possibilities of mental cruelty in private are far worse. And does anyone seriously claim that marriage now is a happier institution than it was in the past?

Twentieth century European civilisation meant that the Vikings no longer show up to rape and pillage, but instead educated men meet at the Wannsee and work out a programme of extermination. One consequence of this is that a rational discourse about right and wrong is replaced by a pseudo-aesthetic discourse couched in terms of the "disagreeable" and the "distasteful", the typical adjectives of "civilisation". It is part of what Sir Tom Stoppard calls

the descent from thinking to feeling.

Lincoln Allison is Emeritus Reader in Politics at the University of Warwick and Visiting Professor of Sport and Leisure at the University of Brighton. His two most recent books are The Global Politics of Sport and The Disrespect Agenda: How the Wrong Kind of Niceness is Making us Weak and Unhappy.

The stunning upset victory of the Republican candidate Scott Brown in the Massachusetts senatorial election occasioned by the death of Ted Kennedy has electrified American pundits. There has been much discussion of whether it was Brown's charisma or the tepid performance of the Democratic candidate Martha Coakley, which decided the contest.

Pollsters are picking over which issue was ultimately decisive: health care - as most believe - or national security, which is the view of Brown's own top strategist Eric Fehrnstrom. One way or the other, it is now much clearer than it was after the Democratic gubernatorial defeats in New Jersey and Virginia last year, that the long marginalisation of the Republican Party widely predicted after the meltdown of November 2008 is far from a foregone conclusion.

This should not surprise anyone. Consider the obstacle faced by John McCain: he was looking to succeed an unpopular second-term president from his own party; he was up against a charismatic and "transformational" Democratic rival; he was deeply committed to an unpopular war; and just before the election the economy collapsed. One could go on.

All the same, McCain secured nearly 47% of the vote, a very respectable result which the vagaries of the electoral college obscured. Given that after the health-care and Iraq compromises President Obama will have huge difficulties in motivating his own base in 2012, the arithmetic for the Republicans was not looking too bad even before the Massachusetts election.

Against this background, and with the Boston wind in their sails, Republicans might well be tempted to play it safe, relying on Mr Obama to self-destruct, or giving the charismatic Scott Brown a national platform, or trying to co-opt as many of the new "tea party" activists who have been scourging Democrat spending and health plans the length and breadth of the country.

That would be a mistake. The false dawn of the 1994 elections, when Newt Gingrich's Contract with America swept to victory only for Bill Clinton to win the presidential election handily in 1996 is a good example of how a purely Congressional and populist strategy for recovery can end in tears. The filibuster-enabling additional opposition senate seat is a major headache for the Democrats, but may also allow the administration to paint the Republicans as obstructionist. If Americans - a majority of whom clearly want some sort of health-care reform - perceive this to be the case, they could well give Mr Obama the benefit of the doubt again in 2012.

And as for the "tea party", this very fissile combination of independents, Republican ultras, and down-right crackpots needs to be treated with great care. We know nothing of its foreign policy stances, for example, beyond a certain knee-jerk muscularity. I suspect it will soon show its true isolationist colours.

Today the tea party has badly burned the Democrats, but tomorrow it could blow up in Republican faces. We are beginning to see this in places like Florida, where moderate Republicans such as governor Charlie Crist face "tea party" challenges. If the result of Massachusetts is simply to accelerate the right-ward drift of the GOP, while encouraging Mr Obama to drag his wayward party back to the centre, then another Democrat win in 2012 is assured.

The Boston result should be the opportunity for something quite different, namely the chance to explore a new kind of Republican Party We still do not know enough about the causes of the victory, but the big picture suggests that it is now possible to conceive of a GOP which must be informed by its southern and western loyalists but should no longer be totally dependent on them. To do this, the party will have to build on existing strengths, to be sure, by finally acting on its strong rhetorical commitment to cut government waste and promote self-reliance. But more than anything else, the party needs to reclaim old strengths. It needs to take back the clothes it shed, and the Democrats stole, over the past forty years. Here are some of the traditions that need to be repatriated.

1. The GOP is the party of Abraham Lincoln
It needs to dispel the impression that it is hostile to African-American aspirations, in particular by showing that its commitment to families, communities, and the entrepreneurial spirit is a surer road to advancement than government handouts and politically correct programmes. There should be no room in the party for anybody who apologises for racism, present - or past. Unfortunately, the "macaca" and other recent incidents, make this injunction necessary.

2. The GOP is the party of Ronald Reagan
For Reagan the promotion of US values abroad was as important as their defence at home. This means that the party should eschew a return to the failed Kissingerian "realism" of yesteryear, by supporting the democratic transformation of the Middle East, the defence of Israel and the creation of a democratic Palestinian state within borders that guarantee the security of both.

3. Above All, the GOP is the party of Teddy Roosevelt
Teddy Roosevelt was the founder of US environmentalism and a supporter of strong government where it is needed, in the provision of education, transport and national security. The party therefore needs to be more vigorous in support of overdue large-scale infrastructural programmes which will stimulate the economy without leading to long-term bloated government payrolls.

It also needs to make some positive proposals on how health care - the spiralling costs of which are a major problem - is to be reformed, an issue which Teddy Roosevelt himself first put on the political agenda in 1912.

Finally, if TR justified the creation of the wilderness parks with reference to the heroic "frontier" myth, his successors must link the protection of the environment to the promotion of American values, for example by reducing dependence on dictatorships in the Middle East. If the connection between health care, the environment, government-spending on productive projects and US national greatness is convincingly made, the public will support it.

The same is true of government financial regulation, which was largely invented by TR's Republican administration in the early 1900s. He was the original "trust buster". He would never have accepted that there were banks that were too important to be subject to the laws of the market. The new GOP must embrace the principle that if a bank is "too big to fail", it is too big, period.

About forty years ago, Republicans and Democrats began to exchange certain geographic and political constituencies. For many years, this paid handsome electoral dividends for the GOP, even if these came at a cultural price. By November 2008, at the latest, it had become clear that the rate of exchange was no longer favourable, not least because Barack Obama showed that the south was no longer the "south". The Boston result shows that two can play at that game. Now is the time to show the Democrats that the north-east is no longer the "north-east" either. It is time to assemble the Coalition for a new Republican Majority.

The author thanks Mr Charles Laderman for very useful comments on an earlier draft.

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.

The alacrity, efficiency and speed with which monies are collected from certain members of the public are in stark contrast with the incompetence, inefficiency, and waste with which the ends for which the monies are supposedly collected are pursued. In short, the British public administration is a Moloch whose appetite grows with the feeding, and whose only real purpose is to feed itself. Existence and expansion is its very raison d'etre.

Recently I parked on a dark and rainy night in an unfamiliar road for twenty minutes. There was only one other car parked within a hundred yards. By the time of my return to the car, a fixed penalty charge ticket had been stuck on my windscreen.

It was true that I had inadvertently parked in an area of residents' parking only. I had therefore nothing to complain of, having carelessly forgotten just how regulated everything has become and that one must assume that what one wishes to do is forbidden until proven otherwise. And, in fact, I accept in general that the regulation of parking in overcrowded places is necessary, for otherwise residents might not be able to park anywhere near their homes.

However, there was something almost indecent in the haste with which I received the ticket, by comparison with what would have happened, say, if my car had been broken into and I had reported it to the police. There is no revenue to be had from policemen on the beat.

Were these regulations national or local, I asked? They were local, he replied. In other words, the visitor is expected to familiarise himself with local regulations (several pages long) wherever he goes. Common sense and discretion are of no avail. These are expected neither of the citizen nor, above all, of the official who applies the rules au pied de la lettre - when the rules provide an opportunity for raising funds, that is.

I had another very similar experience to the one above.

An excellent insight into the nature and purpose of parking enforcement is available on the following website. The writer shadowed an ill-paid parking attendant who in 4 hours of an 8 hour working day earned less than £30 and raised £550 in revenue to be divided between the council and the private contractor who employed him.

In not a single case of the 11 tickets issued (five to police vehicles, one to a Royal Mail vehicle and one to a British Telecom vehicle, which had a correctly-displayed emergency vehicle sign but which has its wheels very slightly on the pavement, and was therefor "done" for "obstruction", though the vehicle quite obviously obstructed no one) was the recipient inconveniencing anyone seriously: practically all the tickets were issued on technicalities. One was issued to a car with a Manchester disabled badge, that had overstayed the length of time allowed in the borough in which the owner parked, but which would have been perfectly all right in Manchester. He, too, was supposed to know the regulations, not merely from region to region, or county to county, but from borough to borough.

The parking attendants (now called civil enforcement officers and provided with baseball caps, as if to emphasise just how far the British are now but trailer-trash Americans) have minimum targets to achieve, with bonuses as the carrot to performance. It is openly acknowledged within the organisation that employs them that revenue-collection is the primary goal.

One would have no cause for complaint or grounds for suspicion if other and more important aspects of the rules were applied with similar rigour and efficiency, but of course this is not so. I know from experience, for example, how difficult it can be to get the police even to record a crime, let alone get them to do anything about it. This difficulty occurs not merely with trivial offences, but with serious ones, up to and including arson and attempted murder. My working-class patients used to tell me regularly that the police refused to entertain their complaints that their houses had been burgled. This, of course, was only natural: the police have the task not of reducing crime, but
of reducing the crime figures, and by far the easiest and most efficient way of doing that is to manipulate them.

Once, called to a police station to examine a person under arrest to determine whether he was fit to be detained and interviewed, my car was broken into while parked immediately outside the police station. When I informed the police of this (to me) surprising occurrence, they replied with perfect equanimity,

I expect that's the Smiths at number 22, they're always breaking into our cars.

The disparity between the bullying nature of officialdom and its manner of revenue extraction (or what in other contexts would be called extortion) from the population, on the one hand, and the very poor return the population gets for its money, on the other, creates a state of mind that oscillates between sullen resentment and pig-headed rebellion, not necessarily against well-chosen targets.

Theodore Dalrymple is a writer and worked for many years as an inner city and prison doctor. He is the author of the author of Junk Medicine: Doctors, Lies and the Addiction Bureaucracy and In Praise of Prejudice: The Necessity of Preconceived Ideas.