The late Lady Thatcher, the great Mrs Thatcher, was wrong about most things but she was right, relentlessly right, about the central problem of her time – the menace of Socialism. She will always be remembered as the woman who destroyed Socialism, much as we remember Churchill as the man who stood up to Hitler. Churchill was wrong about India, about the economy, about most things but on the one big issue he was right. Today we are also free of the spectre of Socialism that haunted the 20th century. That is Mrs Thatcher's legacy.

It is difficult now to remember how close Socialism came to victory in the 1970s. The Soviet Union was steadily advancing its control over the world, notably in Africa and in South East Asia. Latin America was threatened with subversion. The release of the KGB files has shown how many people, including Allende in Chile and senior politicians in India, had been under their control. The Brezhnev doctrine decreed that no country which had ever come under socialist rule could return to democracy. East Europeans feared that their slavery would last for ever.

It was to change. Mrs Thatcher came to power in 1979 and Ronald Reagan in 1981. Between them they defeated the evil empire. The Soviet Union went from world domination to downfall in ten years, the ten years of the woman the Soviets called the Iron Lady. Where other British leaders had been timid, she was bold. Where they had been silent, she was vocal. Where they had been shaky, she was resolute. She understood exactly what the Soviet Union was and meant.

In 1979 Britain was on the verge of economic collapse. The Labour governments of 1974-1979 had been the servants of the trade unions, as well as of their own ideology. Britain was close to being a socialist economy. A large section of industry was owned and run by the State - coal, iron and steel, gas and electricity, telephones and railways. A large part of the country's housing stock was council-owned.

Other important sectors, such as car manufacturing and shipbuilding, depended on government subsidies and were the subject of government directives. The combination of trade union power and lax monetary policy had led to high inflation. Governments sought to deal with this through the state regulation of prices and incomes. Marginal tax rates were very high. The very bases of capitalism -the price mechanism, incentives to earn, save and invest, and rapid change and innovation - were undermined and rendered inoperative.

Mrs Thatcher undermined the trade unions not just by tougher laws but by more stringent monetary policies. When one of them, Scargill's NUM, chose to fight, Mrs Thatcher smashed the strike. The strikers were defeated and the NUM enfeebled. Mrs Thatcher had destroyed the entire working class movement. Edward Heath had lost to the miners twice, the second time disastrously in a confrontation that nearly destroyed the economy and indeed British democracy. Heath talked tough but he never planned for a conflict. Mrs Thatcher did. When Scargill's strike began, coal stocks were high, the flow of coal imports steady, transport dependable and the police well organized. Mrs Thatcher defeated the trade union barons and the wreckers on the shop floor alike. Power was returned to the capitalists. The tide of history had been reversed.

When facing international Communism, Britain was of necessity a junior partner to the United States. It was Ronald Reagan, Mrs Thatcher's close friend and ally, who directed the political, economic and military strategy that led to the fall of the Soviet Union. Nonetheless Mrs Thatcher's determination was an important factor. The imperial will with which the Argentine invasion of the Falkland Islands was repelled and turned into a great British victory was noted by the Communists. So too was her official recognition of the Soviet Union's full responsibility for the murder of the Polish officers at Katyn and her refusal to be deflected from her policy of constructive engagement with South Africa. The defeat of Communism was always her first priority. When Reagan needed to station Cruise Missiles in Britain to counteract the build up of Soviet missiles in Eastern Europe, he knew that Mrs Thatcher would not flinch either from the risks that might be involved or from the political protests it would cause.

Mrs Thatcher was wrong about most things, often because she was insufficiently right wing. During her time in office education continued to decline and crime rose inexorably. Her policies on education and crime, policies designed by unelected leftists on their long march through the institutions, actually made matters worse. She should have purged the relevant ministries and abolished the quangos as her more radical supporters wanted. She checked but failed to roll back Europe and left the road open for her spineless successors to concede even the minor gains that her obduracy had brought.

But she will always be remembered as the Prime Minister who fought and defeated socialism at home and helped to fight and defeat it throughout the world. That we are free today is thanks to her achievements. There could be no finer legacy.

Christie Davies is the author of The Strange Death of Moral Britain. The views expressed above are those of Christie Davies, not those of the Social Affairs Unit, its Trustees, Advisors or Director

I have two granddaughters called Ava and Sylvie. Their other grandparents were born in Kenya and the Punjab. My brothers-in-law live in Abu Dhabi, Singapore and Western Australia, offering a rather neat set of stop-offs on a round-the-world trip. More of my primary school class from Colne, Lancashire live in Toronto, Canada than live in Colne. My wife has cousins in the United States and there is a branch of my mother's family which lives in New South Wales. When I worked at the University of Warwick I was, among other things, the "South Asia Liaison Officer" and regularly visited India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka. In both England and California I have played for predominantly South Asian cricket teams.

These facts might be described as the autobiographical consequences of Empire and I may be an extreme case. I am bound to look at things a bit differently from, for example, the Deputy Prime Minister, Nick Clegg, who has a Dutch mother and a Spanish wife, but I wouldn't want to stress the contrast too much because I believe that both of our connections exemplify globalisation and the place of our country at the absolute forefront of the process.

Yet you can see why I might get a little bit cross when described as a European and asked to show solidarity and cohesion with people who neither play cricket nor speak English. The issue came up in my youth when a Polish girlfriend's mother assumed that I would be in favour of Polish immigration to the UK and against Caribbean immigration and it comes up when European politicians (most recently, Angela Merkel) try to insist that our European connections are more important than any others. Solidarity with those who have offered us the Inquisition, the Napoleonic code and the Gestapo and not with those who have offered us curry. I don't think so! That would have to be racism, wouldn't it?

Great Britain has lost an Empire and not yet found a role

The Acheson line has generally been swallowed by our political elites who have variously and pathetically tried to subsume us under Washington, Brussels or even Moscow. Non-elites, with their Australian relatives, Bajan dreams and local curry houses have generally taken a different view. I am prepared to wager that in a hundred years time the British Empire will be regarded as the greatest single influence on the shape of the world since (at least) the Eurasian population movements at the end of the Roman Empire. And that the "European Union" will be a mere footnote to history, a failed attempt to ring-fence a declining continent from the process of globalisation. Thus I take a particular pleasure when elderly papal nuncios remark that Britain is now a third world country or when some Mittel-European football crowd, from one of those incest-and-folk-dancing places, abuses the England football team (now predominantly of mixed race). It's good to be on the winning side for a change: the future belongs to English-speaking people of mixed race..

It all depends, naturally, on what you mean by empire. Most people, I guess, will attach to that word images from the period 1890-1914: a map (nearly) red from Cape to Cairo, a hundred tribes and nations marching in allegiance to Queen Victoria at her Diamond Jubilee in 1897, the great Durbah of George V in 1911; also, viceroys, district commissioners and a sovereignty on which the sun never set. This was empire as pseudo-state, narrow empire, if you like, and essentially empire as politically convenient fantasy.

That idea of empire made little progress towards its fantasy pseudo-state, whatever its chief protaganists - Rhodes, Beaverbrook, Churchill et al. - might have imagined. The smart money was always on this being a pretty temporary arrangement and so it proved, the credibility of the pompous empire lasting only from 1858 until the fall of Singapore in 1942.

It is often fun to ask an audience whose knowledge of the British Empire is pretty much limited to the fact of its existence - that would be most Brits and nearly all Americans, for instance - what it was and wasn't. It wasn't a currency union: rupees and dollars and rands all existed. It wasn't a legal system, but operated according to all kinds of appropriate local systems. (The most gross examples of foisting "British" values on people by the use of law were mainly African and fairly late.) It wasn't a project of the state, unlike its French, German and Belgian imitators and for most of its history it had more opponents than supporters at Westminster. There were elements of all these things and imperialists who wished it were so, but they had little success.

But the broad empire must be assessed quite differently. It consists of four hundred years of population movements, economic relations of every kind and cultural transfers and it shows no sign of abating at all. It was the expression of an expanding commercial and maritime people and its consequences are infinite. To take three at random, the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) is now the dominant force in the game; Perth, Western Australia is a deal more "Anglo-Saxon" than London and Sir Stamford Raffles vision of founding a port of global significance on an island at the foot of the Malay peninsula has proved 100% successful.

I rather enjoyed the comment of a German student who arrived in my room from the Students' Union where he had been introduced to a new world on the big screens of rugby matches against Southern Hemisphere opposition and cricket test matches against South Asian opposition. He said:

You still have your Empire at least on the playing field.

Lincoln Allison retired from an academic career at the University of Warwick in 2004 - and again in 2008 - to become a freelance writer and broadcaster. He remains Emeritus Reader in Politics at the University of Warwick and Visiting Professor in sport and leisure at the University of Brighton. His latest book is My Father's Bookcase: A Version of the History of Ideas, available as a Kindle download from amazon.co.uk and from amazon.com.

My own magic moment - and everybody was, surely asked about their own best moment? - was Mo Farah's second gold medal, in the 5000 metres. It just so happened that all twelve members of our immediate family were present and we were able to share the common illusion, remarked by no less a figure than the Mayor of London, that we were yelling and willing his acceleration from the pack and over the line. But the magic moments came thick and fast: the goddess Jessica storming home in her final event, her fellow Yorkshirewoman Nicola Adams winning the first women's boxing medal, a horse dancing it's way to dressage victory to patriotic music. Not to mention the constant evidence that British cyclists are faster than French . . . or than anyone else for that matter.

The "feelgood factor" of a home Olympics was surely at a level never experienced at any event before in this country. As the fairy dust descended cynical journalists rolled over and became patriotic puppies. This was "us" as we had always wanted to be: charming and eccentric, but efficient and victorious as well. It was the cosmopolitan, global-imperial us, the Britain of a hundred ethnicities. Mo arrived from Somalia, Jess's dad from Jamaica and the genius behind British dressage gold was a German immigrant, Dr Wilfried Bechtelsheimer.

In fact a kind of millenarium optimism began to flavour the news coverage of the Olympics. Nothing would ever be the same again. This was our redefinition as a nation. Fat, lazy people would be stirred into action. Footballers and other professional sportsmen would be shamed by the nobility of Olympians into behaving decently. Women's sport would finally be recognised as the equal of men's. Nobody would ever sell off a playing field or cancel a games lesson again. If we could only make the gold medalists the cabinet we would be able to live in peace and prosperity for a thousand years. If you weren't part of this level of enthusiasm you weren't in spirit with the times.

Danny Boyle's opening ceremony was a success: though it baffled and annoyed Americans, especially Republicans, and was considered very Anglocentric in the Hispanophone world, it was widely admired elsewhere. The closing ceremony was boring and there is surely something that can be done to improve ticketing, even when dealing with an organisation as corrupt and inefficient as the International Olympic Committee: try making the "Olympic family" buy options on tickets, for instance. Even so, 8 out of 10 for the event would seem a bit mean; give the benefit of the doubt for the wonderful excited atmosphere and call it a 9.

But if the Games were real and the "feelgood factor" only marginally less so, it is a far more complex question to ask what will be their real consequences. As a supposed expert on the politics of sport I have been asked about this incessantly by journalists, as if my speculation could be definitive in ways that their's weren't; the debate goes back at least to Harold Wilson and his speculations about the relationship between the election and the football World Cup in 1970.

One current debate is about whether the "real winner" of the games was Boris Johnson rather than David Cameron. But it is only speculation. The feelgood is at least double value when you hold a succesful games and do very well in the medals table. But who would it benefit? Rationally, it should be past prime ministers. Tony Blair secured the games, but in many ways their presiding genius was a man who was hardly mentioned or seen: John Major instituted an important learning experience in the failed bid for Manchester and in that city's successful securing of the Commonwealth Games (eventually held in 2002), but even more so by establishing the lottery in 1994 which has seen £1.5 billion spent on sport. This is what really mattered; to state briefly a point I originally made in Standpoint, since quite widely quoted, nobody who understands sport is really going to regard China as a greater sporting nation than Spain, despite the gold medal tally being 38-3; nor does Kazakhstan's 7-1 superiority over Argentina denote anything other than an a greater investment in programmes of sports development oriented towards the Olympics.

The "legacy" of a games might have several dimensions: the physical plant and its use, the reputation of the city and country and the "inspiration" of future generations are among the most important. In general it is agreed among scholars that the legacy of previous games has been more or less derisory.

It is to be hoped that London 2012 will be different, but it certainly won't live up to some of the wilder optimism that has been expressed. Boris Johnson's sudden enthusiasm for two hours of compulsory games every day in schools seems to me likely to raise rather than diminish the number of plump girls who conveniently "forget" their games kit when going to school or pester the doctor for a "sickie".

Mo and Jess did everything that could possibly be asked of them, but even their inspiration cannot seriously be expected to arrest a decline in participatory sport which is rooted in the nature of contemporary social change. Of the USA's gold medals 29 out of 46 went to women. Like so much else in the world of the Olympics this is because of a government policy, Title IX of the Education Amendments Act of 1972, which bans gender discrimination in state schools and colleges and has been interpreted to require equal sports facilities (including coaching) for male and female students. But the success of American women and their prominence for two weeks will do nothing to change the situation in which more than 90% of the coverage and resources in American professional sport go to men.

In Which We Triumph was a wonderful experience for the heart, but the head says it doesn't change anything. The Olympic movement continues to be an organisation whose history is steeped in every form of corruption and which thrives because it has generated patriotic feelgood factors for every type of political regime, good and bad, but mostly bad.

Having said that, the whole "feelgood" issue has to be laced with a sceptical approach to the epistemology of social science: it's not just that we don't know, but that we can't know. For instance, what did all that celebration (and redefinition) of "Britishness" do for the Union and for Scotland's place in it?

Possibly nothing, but not necessarily nothing. I am prepared to argue - and have researched the case - that the Soviet Union's Olympic success did have a positive, if temporary, beneficial effect on their union, but in this case the streams of communication and influence are far too complex to judge. We would like to know, but we can't and it will be fifty years or so before historians can make best guesses.

Lincoln Allison retired from an academic career at the University of Warwick in 2004 - and again in 2008 - to become a freelance writer and broadcaster. He remains Emeritus Reader in Politics at the University of Warwick and Visiting Professor in sport and leisure at the University of Brighton. His latest book is My Father's Bookcase: A Version of the History of Ideas, available as a Kindle download from amazon.co.uk and from amazon.com.

About twenty five years ago our family, a married couple and three sons, set off at the end of October on a routine trip to the Pendle area of Lancashire where I grew up. The purposes of the visit were shopping in the mills, watching football and walking, though meeting with friends and relatives in pubs and a slap-up version of fish and chips were also part of the tradition. But on this occasion we had difficulty getting to where we wanted to go because of a police cordon at a five mile radius around Pendle Hill to prevent a vast "Hippy Convoy" - an estimated 5000 people - which was expected to converge on the area for Halloween.

During this period the Pendle District Council was discussing proposals to create a "Witchcraft Theme Park" though they were held up by fundamental differences of interpretation and purpose. At one end of the spectrum were local businessmen who wanted to cash in on broomstick rides, Halloween masks and lots of appropriate tat; at the other were feminist Labour councillors who wanted the park to educate its customers about the grim history of proto-feminists and free thinkers tortured and murdered by patriarchy in the name of religious orthodoxy. The figure of 20 million such martyrs in Europe as a whole was often bandied about, though serious scholarship sees this as an exageration of geometric proportions.

The project was never going to get off the ground and it didn't. At the same time an evangelical minister from Blackburn was getting himself a lot of publicity by claiming that there were far more practising witches than practising Christians in East Lancashire. In short, it was the case that in the place I called home witchcraft was not only the main topic of debate, it occupied second and third place as well. There was an interesting irony to all this: the textile industry of the area was part of the early industrial "revolution", the sort of thing considered jolly important by the likes of Karl Marx, but it had now been and (more or less) gone and we were back to talking about witches again.

There was an immediate version by the prosecuting lawyer, Thomas Potts, which he called, The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Lancashire. In 1848 Harrison Ainsworth published his novel, The Lancashire Witches, which put his sales ahead of those of Charles Dickens for a while. In 1951 Robert Neill wrote what turned out to be his most successful novel, Mist Over Pendle, about the witches; in the United States it appeared as The Elegant Witch.

Now we have Jeanette Winterson OBE, on the 400th anniversary of the events, publishing The Daylight Gate. As one would expect each account reflects its period: Potts's is a self-righteous condemnation which might be said to take witchcraft more seriously than it takes itself in line with his own sovereign's diatribe on the subject. Ainsworth produced a "Gothic" horror story in the tradition of Mary Shelley in which the events in Pendle resonate from a monk's pact with the devil in the previous century. Neill's version, though highly atmospheric, is strictly realist: the "witches" are portrayed as a rural underclass maintaining - at least to a greater degree than their contemporaries - the ancient superstitions in a society in which religious orthodoxy is bitterly contested between Catholics, Puritans and moderate Anglicans.

All accounts give a central place to Alice Nutter, the wealthy and sophisticated widow from the Rough Lee (now the village of Roughlee) who was implicated along with the others and whose involvement seems much more complicated.

So what of Ms Winterson's update? The most obvious remark is that it is very short. Mist Over Pendle was the normal sort of length for a twentieth century novel, half the length of Ainsworth's effort; The Daylight Gate is barely a third of Neill's book, a mere 30,000 words - a novelette, if such a word still exists.

As an interpretation it plays with several approaches. Winterson sets up the possibility of a largely feminist approach by having Alice Nutter in dispute over land with Roger Nowell, the magistrate eventually complicit in her prosecution, but she then eschews this possibility and has Nowell (the sympathetic central character of Neill's book) behaving honourably. (I am sure that if a well known writer had written a novel based on these events in the 1980s it would have had to be a feminist interpretation, but times have changed.)

In this version, Alice visits the Malkin Tower, where the witches meet, in order to offer them charity; it is, in any case, her property. This would allow the possibility of portraying her as a tragic innocent victim. But having set up this possibility Winterson then gives Alice an elaborate and supernatural "back story" involving chemistry, alchemy, Satanic rituals and a lesbian relationship with one of the witches. The last part might be considered a bit predictable on her part, but that doesn't necessarily render it ineffective. In short she seems to shift from writing the first third of her tale on realist assumptions akin to Neill's to the majority which is "Gothic" in the style of Ainsworth.

Historical novels are a problem for those of us who are logical (boring? male?). For instance, I read Bernard Cornwell's Azincourt, the story of an ordinary English archer at Agincourt. I devoured it as one might devour a great greasy kebab with the same sorts of feelings of indigestion afterwards. I then read Anne Curry's scholarly book on the battle which, for example, quotes more than two dozen near-contemporary sources which differ enormously even on the size of the two armies. I want to know what really happened and, if it isn't knowable, I want to know why. A story could never be a substitute for the story. An historical novel is one person's imaginative reconstruction of what might have happened. Fair enough, but I would prefer my own and, in any case, most novelists choose to go beyond this and change what is known.

The supernatural adds another dimension of difficulty, though there are interesting possibilities because modern social science suggests multiple ways of blurring the distinction between the natural and the supernatural. All versions of the story of the Pendle witches begin with the cursing of a pedlar who then becomes severely ill. In Winterson's version this is a fat, lustful fellow who is in sexual negotiations as a result of which he is taunted and cursed and has whatt appears to be a stroke. Which he might well have if he believed in the power of the curse. Here (p.46) Alice Nutter raises the question of how belief is a sort of reality, but with limits:

If they believe they are witches, does that make them so? They will not be escaping the Malkin Tower by broomstick however much Master Potts wants to see them fly over Pendle Hill.

I have written about other world's often enough, I have said what I can say. There are many kinds of reality. This is but one kind . . . But, Mistress, do not seem to stray too far from the real that is clear to others, or you may stand accused of the real that is clear to you.

Lincoln Allison retired from an academic career at the University of Warwick in 2004 - and again in 2008 - to become a freelance writer and broadcaster. He remains Emeritus Reader in Politics at the University of Warwick and Visiting Professor in sport and leisure at the University of Brighton. His latest book is My Father's Bookcase: A Version of the History of Ideas, available as a Kindle download from amazon.co.uk and from amazon.com.

Tom Holland's account of the fall and rise of empires and imperial religions in Late Antiquity is really rather wonderful. It is big and bountiful. It remembers to celebrate the remoteness and glamour of the peoples of the Near East in the first three-quarters of the first millennium. In my ignorance, this was my first encounter with Himyarites and Hephthalites and with Jewish kings who hammered Christians and Saracens who converted to Christianity, and I am grateful that Holland largely fulfils his claim to bring us their stories from the evidence of their contemporaries.

So here we have a grand narrative: the eastern Roman Empire follows its western cousin into decline; Persia's immemorial greatness crumbles; and all sorts of marauding types on the fringes of the ordered world – they are more or less scruffy and uncivilised – find themselves rather ahead of the game. But one lot, the Arabs, do far, far better than anyone had any right to expect. So far, so exhilarating, and even larky: the prose is by turns occasionally demotic and Gibbonesque). But Tom Holland succeeds on a much higher plane, and also fails there.

As well as exotic, this very courageous book aims to be intellectual. It has three great themes. Theme #1 is the role of monotheism. Holland says that it is important that the empires of Late Antiquity, whether on the way down or the way up, embraced the idea of a single, universal god who allies himself with the powers-that-be and in particular the monarch and his imperialism. Theme #2 is the Arab embrace of this habit, caught as it were, from Zoroastrians, Christians and (less comprehensively) Jews. Theme #3 is the wider, continuing Muslim self-deception as generation upon generation fails to notice that the story of their religion is importantly and maybe mostly an ordinary 9th Century invention and that it imitated other Abrahamic religions of the book.

I have laid the themes out in that way because that is the way they are laid out in Tom Holland's introduction. But it is the last claim which grabs one's attention; which takes up most space in the introduction; and which Channel 4 made more famous when they had Holland make a documentary.

It is, on the face of it, a spectacular claim. To repeat it: as to the life of the Prophet there is no Arab evidence from his own time and precious little from any other sources. Indeed, we know nothing beyond anecdote about his revelations or his role in leading the military, religious or political developments of his time. We do know a good deal about the process by which later Caliphs caused a narrative to be built, and their work seems to have plenty of expediency mixed in with devotion to the faith or truth. There may, though, be something in the remarks of Richard Miles in his Financial Times review of the Holland book to the effect that the Islamic tradition may be more squarely built on a 7th and 8th Century oral tradition than In the Shadow of the Sword allows.

I have ended up far more irritated than charmed by this big book and its clever and bold author. I came to feel that every exciting anecdote was a distraction from the book's great deficiency: that here was a fine story-teller who – like Scheherazade – was directing our attention away from something. Here, one felt, was a book which was masquerading as an investigation by a real historian when really it was a regurgitation of the spadework of others by an intellectual journalist with a novelist's genes.

This impression may be both true and false. It may be that Tom Holland's technique is disguising his real genius. It may be that he is not only master of a great tale but also of the grand historical narrative. It may be that his understanding of the power and uses of the monotheistic narrative - its use by elites all those centuries ago – is truly the insight of a modern master of the post-modern. It may be that Tom Holland has taken us well beyond what other, more pedestrian historians had seen. But he gives us little of the nuts and bolts of the historiography which lies behind his book and this means we cannot see where the border lies between what he has learned from others and what only he can now teach us.

Curiously, Tom Holland's rather long-winded and breathy TV documentary, Islam: The untold story, was in one sense better than the book. At least some of the historians who have pioneered the historical investigation of Islam's origins were given their own space and voice. And it is surely true, as Nick Cohen says in his Standpoint review of the show, that this was perhaps the first time that television has showed any journalistic courage in the matter.

Tom Holland seems quite careful to resist any political dimension to his work. He leaves well alone anything of the "clash of civilisations" sort. He is no Elie Kedourie, Ephraim Karsh or Bernard Lewis (whose new Notes on a Century: Reflections of a Middle East Historian is great reading on the history of Islamic historicism).

If he avoids moral or political judgement, Holland was clearly right to stress that the spiritual value and power of a narrative does not depend on its being true.

Tom Holland is right to mention that Christianity has faced much of the same difficulties as to its history as are now confronting Islam. It is perhaps right to underplay - though Holland's book rightly mentions – that the stress Islam lays on the factual accuracy of its holy book's divine and prophetic origins makes historical doubt more challenging for that faith than for Christianity. So I am tempted to emphasise that the whole point of faith is that it goes beyond the ordinarily factual.

In short, for the faithful who are also intelligent, this side of the grave there is no evidence as to a religion's origin, or lack of it, which can seriously enforce or demolish its spiritual merit. Islam may face a bigger crunch than Christianity as it follows older religions in absorbing these facts, and it may be galling to its adherents to have come late to its version of the Protestant Reformation (and is perhaps getting a surprising wallop of fundamentalism alongside some humanism), but it is hard for a westerner to avoid thinking that this looks like terrain which is familiar as well as unavoidable.

Richard D. North is the author of The Right-wing Guide to Nearly Everything.

Britain is once again at odds with Europe over the budget which Prime Minister David Cameron is effectively threatening to freeze at current levels. There is, of course, a long history of such confrontations, beginning in the 1980s, when Margaret Thatcher negotiated the famous "rebate" which led to a substantial net reduction of Britain's contribution to the Community.

The renewed tension has revived concerns among British Europhiles, already aghast at Cameron's previous use of the veto late last year on the issue of fiscal union and taxes on financial transactions, that the country is "isolated" in Europe. It has also led to another push from Berlin this week to woo London. This too, is nothing new in itself, and reflects a longstanding German desire to have the British on the inside, not least to balance the French.

Today, however, the context is very different, and depending on what she meant Chancellor Merkel's remarks either point to a solution of the crisis now facing the continent, or reflect a fundamental misunderstanding of how Britain can and should fit into the polity which must emerge from the ruins of the past three years. The German leader has announced that she

does not want a Europe without Great Britain. That would be historically and economically unthinkable.

he founding errors in the architecture of the economic and currency union.

Taken separately, both of these statements are absolutely correct. Britain's historic engagement in Europe is so obvious as to need to further explanation. She has always been a major European power, and is today the most formidable military player on the continent after the USA. So long as the European Union was a Confederation of free-trading and politically cooperating sovereign states, the benefits of membership far outweighed the (sometimes considerable) irritations.

It is at this point, however, that London and Frau Merkel seem to part company. If she means Britain to be part of this start from the beginning, then she fails to grasp that such a move would run contrary to the entire sweep of her national history. For reasons largely to do with their diverging early and mid-twentieth century experiences, the project of a single European state is designed to fix something that was never broken in Britain. Indeed, its purpose should be to create a "British" Europe - in constitutional and fiscal terms - rather than to "Europeanise" Britain.

If it is a success, there is a possibility that the British might join a politically united Eurozone in the future - just as it ultimately joined the EEC in the early 1970s - but there is no chance whatsoever that she will do so from the start in the immediate future. If that is Merkel's desire, then she is under a truly tragic misapprehension. First, because she will soon hit a complete brick wall in London. Secondly, because by insisting that Britain be of the party, she risks antagonising the British mainstream, including most of Mr Cameron's government, who would otherwise greatly favour her plans for greater Eurozone integration. It is no secret that the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Mr Osborne, would greatly prefer such an outcome - whatever its risks for the City and other British interests - than the chaos attendant on a collapse of the common currency.

My hope, therefore, is that Frau Merkel's remarks distinguished, at least implicitly, between a desire that Britain remain in the European Union and the demand that she sign up to deeper integration. In that case, she must press for the creation of a new (possibly renamed) Union, principally made up of the single-state Eurozone and Britain, still joined together through free trade and close political and military cooperation (not least within NATO).

In this context, Britain could continue to pay into the budget - much as she had subsidised European princes for hundreds of years, in return for the continued common market and a voice n the establishment of its operating rules. Part of this arrangement must be an implicit bargain with the Eurozone not to encourage the Scots, Welsh or Northern Irish to leave the United Kingdom for the new state; it should also maintain an appropriate distance from British Europhiles, at least until British opinion has been persuaded of its own accord of the success of the whole project. In this way, the new state will initially resemble a majestic cathedral, with a German nave and French transept, with many and diverse national side-chapels - and with two mighty buttresses, Britain and the United States, supporting the whole edifice from the outside.

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.

Sunday observance has collapsed. This has been one of the most noticeable developments of 20th century Britain. I am old enough to remember when people did not put out washing on their lines on Sunday mornings for fear of scandalising their neighbours, when if you missed a church service on Sunday someone would call round to make sure you were not ill and when pubs were shut on Sundays before 12 and during the mid-afternoons.

Then came the Sunday Trading Act 1994 and the supermarkets were able to open on Sundays for a limited number of hours. The first time I went shopping in my local Tesco on a Sunday, I met a local acquaintance by the fruit and vegetables who thought it necessary to launch into an elaborate explanation of why he needed to be there. Pub hours became progressively more relaxed. For all but a few church goers Sunday has become a day like any other, but without employed work.

During the riots magistrates' courts in London and Manchester were open far longer. It was acknowledged by all those involved with the working of the courts that it was an exceptional situation which called for an exceptional response. Defence solicitors, like court clerks, police officers and prosecutors, turned out during the night and early morning to represent defendants in custody.

The Ministry of Justice saw this as a success, though for many all that was achieved was speed and the Court of Appeal spent a considerable time afterwards clearing up the mess that had been caused by over-hasty court decisions. Depriving a person of his or her liberty is a serious matter and ought not to be decided in a hurry – unless we want to have a criminal justice system like Saudi Arabia!

Now the Government, having seen that it can be done, wants magistrates' courts to sit for longer and to hear trials on Sundays. It will doubtless be argued that this will give defendants "choice", but this is the same government which has been busily hastening the closure of local courts so that defendants, usually with no money for bus or train fares, have to travel 40 miles or more to court.

The arguments are that there is no extra money on the table to compensate defence lawyers, although prosecutors and court staff are to be paid extra. There are complaints that Sunday working will disrupt family life, not that it will be religious discrimination, and that there has been no time for firms to amend the contracts of their employees. It has been pointed out that prisons are not geared up to receiving prisoners on a Sunday and that extra will have to be paid to those who transport prisoners from police stations to courts or to and from prisons. Few are as yet arguing from principle that Sunday is the Sabbath and a day of rest, and that running trial courts routinely is not the same as going to the police station for an emergency when someone has been arrested, which can be equated with the biblical retrieval of an ass from a pit. Defence solicitors can be heard singing from the same hymn sheet - but there are no hymns!

Perhaps the government would like to abolish weekends. In these straitened times of economy perhaps no one at all should be allowed not to work on Saturdays and Sundays. Perhaps crown court judges and jurors would enjoy having their right to weekends removed. Perhaps MPs could be available for their constituents and all offices and shops could be permanently open. After all this would be logical.

Or maybe this idea will be shown to be unworkable, costly and deeply unpopular, and someone will have the wit to tell the incoming Justice Secretary, Chris Grayling, that it should very quietly be shelved.

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 Criminal Justice Under Siege.

This is my ninth Olympics, not as a competitor, but as a whinger. Ever since 1980 I have managed to persuade at least one outlet to publish or broadcast my tiny little counterblast, my "He's got no clothes on" shriek, against Olympic propaganda. That takes one back to 1980, the Moscow games and the accession of "His Excellency" Juan Samaranch to the Presidency of the International Olympic Committee. He was a former Falangist helping a bunch of Communists in their propaganda purposes, which is historically a typical Olympic alliance. My original outlet was dear old New Society.

In 1980 the Olympics ceased to be what they had been for most of their modern history and even remained a little in Montreal in 1976, which was a great festival of amateur sport intimately linked to the grass roots of sport and became a curious combination of the Soviet and the commercial. Since then they have failed to fit either of the two justifiable models of modern games because they are neither amateur activity done for the love of it nor are they entertainment organised commercially.

The overwhelming majority of Olympic sports have no spectator following of any substance and in the case of those which do (such as tennis, basketball and football) the event is peripheral and a nuisance to the normal calendar. Olympians are no longer the outsiders who make it in their own way - as Harold Abrahams was or Don Thompson who won a walking medal in 1960 training on his own, using his own methods. Nor are they genuinely commercial stars like Lewis Hamilton or Didier Drogba. They are Soviet-style, state-subsidised creatures, competing for the benefit of their political masters: "Team GB" with the PM as skipper.

So what is in it for politicians and for the state? The Third Reich, the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China are only the most notable examples of states which have abandoned an initial hostility to the Olympic movement in favour of trying to succeed within it. If David Cameron is looking for a feelgood factor from the 2012 games, which he surely is, he treads in the footsteps of Nazis and Communists.

There is a kind of mirrored perception factor which can be generated either by winning a lot of medals or by holding a successful games because these things generate a national perception that one is admired elsewhere. They let you strut on the global village green. And this effect comes pretty cheap.

There has been corruption in the allocation of games, in the covering up of breaches of rules (including doping) and in the judging of events. The latter includes marking cartels to rival those of the Eurovision Song Contest. I won't dwell on the idea that £12 billion spent on hosting the games is a ridiculous way of spending money, much of it taken from sources that would have gone to grass roots sport and from places that needed money a lot more than London did.

Also the "beneficial legacy" argument doesn't really get off the ground in terms of historical examples: the Athens site from 2004 is already derelict and the Barcelona site from 1992, which is considered the most successful and which I visited a few weeks ago, is a minor tourist attraction, but essentially a white elephant. The core problem here is that a stadium with an athletics track is something for which there is demand only three weeks in every four years. There may be some hope that the legacy of London 2012 will be better than that of predecessors, but there isn't much to beat.

All of these criticisms of the games seem to me, at least, rational and informed, but rationality and information have little to do with reality. What is real is what the American sports sociologist Rick Gruneau calls "fairy dust", which turns dross into glamour. The overwhelming majority of people would not normally cross the road to watch gymnastics, weight-lifting or synchronised swimming if they were free - and even track and field athletics is essentially a small and declining sport, but give them the Olympic magic and there is a scramble for tickets, a longing for the chance to say "I was there".

It is live attendance that matters; during previous games I have sat with cricket teams many a time in pubs when there has been Olympic sport on television and, although everybody present was interested in sport, nobody even bothered to turn their head to watch. Since this is the first Olympics in England in the television age it will be interesting to see the pattern of viewing figures.

In this context we should attribute a touch of genius and perhaps a bit of luck to the founder of the modern games, Pierre de Coubertin, who insisted on the Olympiad, but eschewed Olympia. Often accused of "Anglomania", he originally wanted his world games to be a tribute to the English public school system.

The classical Greek reference proved to be a strong selling point, but it also threatened a kind of ownership by the modern Greeks, whom De Coubertin didn't much like. So after the opening games in Athens in 1896 one of his firmest principles was that they should circulate, even if that meant the games were fairly marginalised as they were, in different ways, in Paris in 1900 and St. Louis in 1904. The Greeks held their own (now unacknowledged) games in Athens in 1906. Every four years in a different city means that most people have one chance a lifetime to attend an Olympics.

The Greek project for a permanent site for the games would have made much more economic sense than the system of circulating the games. When the IOC were essentially bankrupt after Montreal in 1976 and lacking potential hosts the Greek version was right back on the agenda. As envisaged by Constantin Karamanlis, then Greek Prime Minister, it would have involved an international sovereign territory with analogies to the Vatican and the United Nations. But in the end Peter Ueberroth's "free enterprise games" in Los Angeles in 1984 proved to be a decisive change of direction. Samaranch embraced the commercial and media potential of the games and now the world's leading cities compete to host and subsidise the games.

But fairy dust is not just a naturally produced cultural substance. A good deal of effort goes into its manufacture. The BBC may be a balanced broadcaster interested in wide and challenging debate on some issues, but in its proud role of "the Olympic Broadcaster" it is anything but. The rest of our communicators aren't much better. We're all to become Soviet citizens now, if we aren't already, proud to see our men and women up on that podium, symbolising the superiority of our way of life. But though fairy dust is powerful magic, it does not last forever. The question is not what we will make of London 2012 in 2012, but what we will make of it in 2013 and thereafter.

An extended essay on Pierre De Coubertin's conception of the Olympics in relation to their current development is Lincoln Allison, "The ideals of the founding father: mythologised, evolved or betrayed?" in John Sugden and Alan Tomlinson (Eds.) Watching the Olympics, Routledge, 2012.

Lincoln Allison retired from an academic career at the University of Warwick in 2004 - and again in 2008 - to become a freelance writer and broadcaster. He remains Emeritus Reader in Politics at the University of Warwick and Visiting Professor in sport and leisure at the University of Brighton. His latest book is My Father's Bookcase: A Version of the History of Ideas, also available as a Kindle download from amazon.co.uk and from amazon.com.

In the five years I spent in Oxford in the 1960s I spent a good deal of time in London which was a 22 shilling return rail fare away. (The price must have varied, but that's the one I remember.) This was supposed to be swinging London and there were some good moments: walking down the King's Road on a Saturday morning with a girl whose face appeared in advertisements and England's 1966 World Cup campaign, for instance.

But even though it was the place to be I never liked it and there were dark images to contrast with the positive ones. The extreme squalor of the Soho strip club which I visited with an undergraduate friend. Fulham Broadway station filled with Chelsea fans singing, " 'Arry Roberts is our friend . . . 'e kills coppers". The cheap, tasteless tat sold on Carnaby Street. Friends' flats on wet Sunday mornings with everybody sitting around with the newspapers and whingeing - because there was nothing else to do.

London was dark, depressing, declining, dirty . . . I could continue, even alliteratively. I absolutely resolved never to live there, even though most of my friends did. Like the countryside, it would do for visits. For actual living, you needed a nice town - Royal Leamington Spa in my case.

No regrets, but it would be a more difficult decision nowadays and I might well have been prepared to live in London - and as it is I have my cherished Oyster card and a bed in my youngest son's flat. The city has revived and regenerated beyond any expectations which were held forty or fifty years ago.

One interesting, though superficial, way of looking at this is to list the places where you might take a first-time London visitor now. A substantial number just weren't there in the 1960s including Covent Garden, the London Eye, the Queen's Walk, the Globe Theatre, the O2 Arena, the Millennium Bridge and Tate Modern. I venture to suggest that there are more of these new icons in London than there are in other global cities such as Paris and New York.

It is also true that some of the old London pilgrimage destinations have been improved beyond the imaginations of the 1960s; this is dramatically true of the Meccas of sport, including Wimbledon, Wembley, Lord's, Twickenham and Ascot. It isn't just the fabric of these places which has improved, but the spirit as well. When my little football team had the cheek to be the first to win at Chelsea's Stamford Bridge for some years a couple of years ago the home fans gave "us" a standing ovation and we all mingled and conversed in the streets afterwards. In the sixties we would have had to slink away faking London accents for fear of being beaten up.

Yet all of these, on closer examination, turn out to have a seat-of-the-pants, semi-accidental quality to them. The green belt was only maintained because of a backbench rebellion (in 1981). A whole raft of policies existed only because of riots. Much was facilitated because the main opposition party had temporarily fallen off its trolley.

In short if there was a virtue in the making of policy it was certainly not vision, but flexibility. And that was allied to a cultural virtue, the English global mentality. After four hundred years of commerce, piracy, empire et al., the outlook and connections of Londoners are able to accept the ambitions and abilities of everybody. Nowhere could be more sharply contrasted to the incest-and-folk-dancing corners of Europe than London. As a result, you walk down the river bank from Tower Bridge to the Houses of Parliament and you experience the strangeness of a town on an offshore island that feels like the centre of the universe.

Lincoln Allison retired from an academic career at the University of Warwick in 2004 - and again in 2008 - to become a freelance writer and broadcaster. He remains Emeritus Reader in Politics at the University of Warwick and Visiting Professor in sport and leisure at the University of Brighton. His latest book is My Father's Bookcase: A Version of the History of Ideas, also available as a Kindle download from amazon.co.uk and from amazon.com.

I knew I was a fan of LBJ long before I opened Volume 4, the latest, of Robert A. Caro's gargantuan biography. The guts of the story are obviously appealing. LBJ the operator, thrust into power, delivers the programme that the murdered JFK could only dream of. That was what I learned from The Economist some time in the 1960s.

Back then it fitted nicely with my growing awareness that the soft-left liberal mindset was all kind of things I should dislike. One had the ancient right-wing prejudice that professional reformers – the left - could seldom turn resentment into progress. More specifically, and true to the emerging post-modern obsession with appearances, one sensed that the Kennedy aura was a miasma which allowed liberals too much self-satisfaction and too little self-examination.

I was not exactly a reactionary but I saw that the lefty liberals owned the Camelot franchise and the means of promoting it. It took the right to have the courage to stand up for bastards.

Of course, there is a problem with any right-wing prejudice in favour of Lyndon Baines Johnson and it is that he was to some degree only a more successful socialist than the Kennedys were. As Caro makes clear, Johnson's long-standing mask of conservatism was merely what was required to make him successful as he wooed Texan Democrats. At worst, LBJ quivered with victimhood. At best, he had a real empathy with poor black people. But in neither guise could he easily be claimed for the right, except whilst he was pretending to believe in the forces of reaction.

So the story is of course very rich. Caro gives us a properly feeling but also political account of the assassination and the transition of power. As president, Johnson – like a Marvell comic hero – blossomed. His three years of humiliation as JFK's vice-president were shrugged off. His erstwhile dread of failure no longer plagued him. His long previous years as a master pragmatist in the Senate paid off in spades. He became, full-on, the Roosevelt New Dealer he told people the record showed him always to have been.

And even then, as he became loudly principled, Caro lets us know that Johnson was being political: to win in 1964 on his own account he needed to show he was his own man and he needed big city, East coast, support. In short, he had, he said, "to get out in front" and to out-Kennedy Kennedy. Within hours of becoming president, this southerner had seen how to produce reforms which for quarter of a century had been blocked by southerners. Within weeks, he had engineered them. The miracle was that by his fourth day in office he brushed off some cautious advice, declaring, "Well, what the hell's the presidency for?"

As is widely noted, Caro is a fantastic writer. He almost keeps one's attention through the sheer detail of his account of the games, at once brutal and subtle, that congressional government produces in the US's federal republicanism. This is mother's milk and devil's brew to political junkies but becomes a little tedious to lesser mortals.

But as one flips a few pages, one quickly finds the author giving us anecdotes about LBJ's feud with Robert Kennedy or his corrupt late night phone calls that jump the reader out of the Senate and into Vanity Fair (the magazine) or even LA Confidential. Even these can seem obsessive at times.

It is a good thing that Caro repeats himself in this volume: it becomes a stand-alone work. Enough of the substance of previous volumes is retold to make them, if not redundant, at least not absolutely vital. What's more, Caro's discursiveness within the volume means that one can skip pages and still pick things up pretty well. The saga of LBJ's conduct of the Vietnam War, the subject of Volume 5, is trailed and presaged, and the whole LBJ legacy properly hinted at.

At times, I wondered if Caro did enough of the serious work of a biographer. He gives us a huge quantity of evidence. But do we get enough judgement? To take one area: LBJ's needy nastiness. Caro tells us that Kennedy insiders thought that LBJ pushed subordinates around. Robert Kennedy said Johnson, "Just eats up strong men". But I don't recall that issue being addressed from any other point of view, let alone Caro's (though he promises this feature of LBJ will emerge more strongly in his next volume).

To take another: LBJ was clearly corrupt in some of his dealings. As a senator he forced people to buy advertising on his TV stations and as president he threatened federal action against media outlets that investigated this, his dark side. Caro does not place this kind of activity in any sort of context (though he promises it will re-emerge). To take a third: Caro, in spite of his own claims, does not really give us the national and intellectual contexts which we get in, say, Rick Perlstein’s one volume Nixonland (though we are also spared Perlstein's 2020 hindsight).

But if Caro does rather stick to the knitting, it's enough to give us a staggering psychic adventure. LBJ emerges as a sort of hero. He may be a bit of a monster, but there was tenderness as well as viciousness and grandeur as well as footwork. Caro makes his LBJ portrait deliver the evidence that politics is sort of beautiful; that its realities are as interesting as its fictions; that principles and pragmatics are both vital to it. And that, above all, politics can't be merely pretty, or aspirational or goody-goody.

So Caro gives us Lyndon Johnson in a form which would have a Shakespeare richly intrigued. This is work worthy of Cicero – or a Robert Harris novel.

Richard D. North is the author of The Right-wing Guide to Nearly Everything.

This is a good and important book, but its most important messages only come through toward the end and rather in spite of the material which precedes them. Manning up is not a great title for the book. The book says men are not manning up, and even if the title is ironic, it is still a pity that the book's main failing is in not telling us how they might. In short, it fluffs the real issue, which is that women need to fulfil their historic role: to make their mates man up. Feminism's real effect was not so much to empower women as to weaken men in ways which causes more damage to females than to males.

The early chapters are lively stuff, presented in the modern, bouncy American way familiar to followers of Alvin Toffler or Faith Popcorn, or their stylistic love-child, Malcolm Gladwell. There is plenty of anecdotage from the middle and upper echelons of American society. This is the world, trailed by Cheers, featuring in Friends, and reaching its apotheosis in Sex and the City and a tranche of Hollywood movies such as the 2007 Knocked Up, "with such overgrown boy actors as Steve Carrell, Luke and Owen Wilson, Jim Carrey, Adam Sandler, Will Ferrell, and Seth Rogen" about the singleton world.

It is the world of Bridget Jones. The big picture is that young women have thrived in education and employment. They are having less success with men. The kind of men they ought to like are also doing quite well, being educated and employed. But, as Hymowitz notes, the modern man has become a charmless sort of a brute. Some chaps become macho, others become techie, but the general picture is that young women feature in their lives as sexual objects and not much else. The women return this absence of favour. Screwing-around is embraced by old Adam and modern Eve.

For most of the book, the immediate human cost of this equation, its lack of grace, is fairly well put. But its real import is not rammed home. Hymowitz charts it without any reference to the awkward thought that feminism has commanded that women give away the one commodity whose bartering brought men to heel and civilised them.

We might call this the Carrie Syndrome. As Hymowitz notes, Sex and the City was enjoyed as a saga of fashion, style and singles sex. On the promotable surface, we saw a world of liberated privilege for women. Hymowitz notes that

the four alpha females struggle to find a mate worthy of their knowledge economy status.

I think that Hymowitz does really get all this (stripped, perhaps, of the extremes of my Neanderthal anti-feminism). The last few pages of Manning Up come close to nailing the really modern features of the problem women face. We learn that most women still want to be married, and educated women want to be so rather more than their less fortunate sisters. (The proportion of women getting married has declined a little.) Women are marrying later, which is good for the chances of the marriage. But women are having their babies later, which is bad for their babies and for the family and society. (Educated women are not breeding at replacement rates anyway, which is bad.) More women are becoming lone "Choice Mothers", by which is usefully implied that they are not unwittingly getting pregnant or casually keeping their babies. But, says, Hymowitz, these Choice Mothers are not anti-men. Rather, they've been dating all their preadult lives and have not come across the man who will get with their programme.

Kay S Hymowitz's important service is to stress (late in her story) that adult, family-orientated men are still of great value and that sensible women come to see that this so, perhaps too late. But the deeper problems are not addressed here. Hymowitz does note that historically boys became family-men because society insisted on it: it was a bold male who dared avoid adulthood, and that meant fatherhood. It was also the only safe, reliable, respectable way to get sex. But there is too little emphasis that modern men behave badly because they are allowed to. Too late, women find they can't be ladettes into their mid-20s and hope to be married mothers in their late 20s. So Hymowitz's weakness is that she doesn't address the problem of modern young women trying to have it all.

Not merely should women favour their sexual dignity. They probably need to see that making families impoverishes people. Modern young people ought to try to form couples and have babies in their late 20s or early 30s and accept that one or other of the partners has to take a very serious career hit to provide the parenting children seem to need. Perhaps both do.

This is tough for modern young women. They think as feminists that they must be able to choose what used to be men's roles in sex and earning. As consumers they stick to their careers partly because they prize affluence over motherhood. They resent being told they may need to trade carry-on luggage in an airliner for a baby buggy in the High Street. And techno-fixes – the medicalisation of choice - may not work. Not-so young women may not like the messages in the 2010 The Kids Are All Right (in which youngsters fathered by AI hanker after old-style paternal identities).

The retreat of socialism may play a role in changing female thinking. If the state won't pay for good child care, or such a thing is no longer considered something the state could provide even if it wanted to, more young people will consider raising their own toddlers. It is also likely that commuting costs will continue to rise, and this will tend to make it less feasible or attractive for the lesser-earning partner to continue to schlep into a job which he or she would have progressed beyond had they not taken a baby-break. It may even be that people will realise that if one can't have parenthood and full-on affluence, the former's the better choice.

The future is quite bright for middle class men and women alike, but one way or another, they will have to find a new middle way. For thirty or forty years after the Second World War, marriageable suburban women felt obliged to opt for a tedious life in which they were not really fulfilled in the child-rearing which was supposed to occupy them, and for which they had abandoned their recently-won sexual and career freedoms. By the way, Hymowitz is very good on the pre-Maxim, Playboy generation of men and women. There is surely a thesis to be made of the transgressive Ratpack and their broads morphing into the hippie and his chicks as alternatives to marriage. (It is the bumpy territory of Mad Men.)

Modern girls are probably beginning to see the shape of some satisfactory alternatives to the mores of their mothers and grandmothers (whether conventional or bohemian; feminist or obedient) and maybe their men do too.

However, the tragedy of the commons may kick-in. Society used to force almost all women to be wary of pre-marital sex, and that produced the effect that almost all men became married fathers quite young. Now, unless something makes most women become less free with their sexual favours, those that want to prioritise parenthood may find it hard to find young men to share their ambition. And it is still an open question whether youngsters will swap affluence for family.

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

Captain E. J. Smith of the Titanic was described as "the highest paid seaman on earth" and "a celebrity in his own right". He was born in 1850 in a terrace house in Hanley, Stoke, the son of a potter. Sir William Robertson (Bart.) was born in 1860; the son of a Lincolnshire farm labourer, he rose to become C.I.G.S. - Chief of the Imperial General Staff. Ramsay MacDonald, the illegitimate son of a farm labourer and a housemaid, was born in 1866 and twice served as Prime Minister. Edgar Wallace, born in 1875 to a single, destitute actress became an immensely wealthy author and died in Beverley Hills in 1932. H. G.Wells probably made marginally less money than Wallace, but accrued more literary prestige; he was born in 1866 and his father was a jobbing gardener in Kent.

The force of all this struck me as I stood in front of an audience of a hundred or so journalism students. The lecture was on the history of sports journalism and I was talking about Sir Neville Cardus who started work for the Manchester Guardian round about the time Captain Smith was going down with his ship. It sounded like a fairy story. He walked into the office of the editor, the great C. P. Scott? And he'd left school at twelve? He didn't have a degree? Or an N.C.T.J. qualification? No five-figure debt just to give himself the theoretical chance of a decent job? He quickly became the chief music correspondent and the chief cricket correspondent? No period as an intern? No connections?

Cardus was born in either 1888 or 1889 (probably the former) to a Manchester prostitute. He had a large slice of luck when he became the cricket professional at Shrewsbury School and got on well with the Head, Giles Alington, who made him his secretary and offered him, in effect, a personal education. Cardus would have gone to Eton with Alington if he hadn't been waiting for a decision on his call-up, so when he was turned down for the forces because of his short sight (he was a bowler rather than a batsman) he went to the "M.G."

I had known this story all my life, but it suddenly struck me how odd it must look to those struggling to get on in 2012, especially as they have been brought up on bizarre theories of progress which imply that their life-chances should be better than those of a nineteenth century prostitute's son.

My audience was in some respects exactly the opposite of these men because they will train into their twenties for a job which very few of them will be allowed to do. Many of them will have a picture of themselves in gown and mortarboard the day they graduated from "Uni" which they can look at when they come back from the Tesco checkout or from signing on. The alternative answer to the question posed by Neil Kinnock and then Joe Biden ("Why am I the first Kinnock/Biden to go to university?") is "Because the world used to be less ossified; it had fewer restrictive practices".

If social mobility were some kind of military project it seems to have ground to a halt on many fronts. It must always tend to close down because those who have naturally try to look after their own progeny and to protect what they've got. Nowhere does this seem more true than in contemporary acting: every time I look up some rising star I seem to find that they are the progeny of people in the business (Benedict Cumberbatch, Emilia Fox, James Fox, Daniel Radcliffe, Keira Knightley, etc.) or extremely expensively educated (Dominic West, Damien Lewis, Emily Blunt, Rosamund Pike). Acting is, perhaps, now like the Bar in that you have to be well-heeled or have connections to afford the training and survive the period of low pay and under-employment.

There have always been institutions such as the medieval church and the Royal Navy which were conduits of upward mobility. And periods in which economic growth and rapid technological progress mean that it's a far more general phenomenon than in more static periods. Even now some parts of the computer industry – such as the games industry – work like that with the first class degrees sitting alongside the self-taught and being judged on what they can do. But business has tended to ossify into a world of MBAs and "graduates from good universities".

Another thing the successes I quoted had in common was a complete absence of visible tattoos and piercings. (I'm guessing Captain Smith might have had a discreet anchor somewhere about his person as my grandfather did; he was born in 1880 and joined the Merchant Navy from a fishing background, receiving his Master's Certificate and his first command in 1910.) These are the trivial evidences of a serious condition: what I mean is that none of them defined themselves as inferior – they were respectable and self-respecting people in a respectable and self-respecting society. There is a suspicion now that more people than ever disqualify themselves from any kind of worthwhile job.

The standard target for explanatory accusations for all this is the comprehensive education system and there surely is a case to answer. You send a lower class lad or lass along to a proper grammar school and he or she can become emancipated from their background and receive a good education. The comprehensive school struggles all the time with discipline, standards, relevance and so on and leaves most of its inmates in essence just as they were. The middle-class children usually do all right, of course; my three sons went to the local comp (not my idea) and they all have good degrees, jobs, houses and so on. Occasionally they exchange a "How are you doing mate?" in a local pub with various likeable characters who haven't got a job or, sometimes, are just out of gaol.

But my personal view is that university expansion has done the most damage. In my generation there were still the John Majors and Alan Sugars who needed no education and tens of thousands of excellent solicitors, bank managers and accountants who went straight from school into a training on the job. But all this has now gone as a glass ceiling has slid over, denying opportunities to non-graduates. Put simply, when 5% go to university equality of opportunity is much greater than when 50% go.

Lurking behind any explanation of what has happened is the concept of equality and the status it has in our society. In a democracy it is necessary that governments and aspiring governments talk the language of equality. (It would be refreshing if they didn't, if those on the hustings stood up and said, "My policies are designed to appeal to inferior people".) But nobody really believes in equality: genes and families conspire to make us unequal in every possible respect. There's an interesting exploration of residual inequality in L. P. Hartley's dystopian novel, Facial Justice, first published in 1960: one implication is that when you have eradicated all the inequalities you can eradicate, the inequality of sexual attractiveness looms as large as all the others put together.

Utilitarianism justifies many forms of provision and redistribution: for example, some redistributive taxation works not only because the money is more valuable to the poor than to the rich, but because – up to a point – it makes economies work better. But, I submit, there is no sound Utilitarian argument for a policy of 50% of an age-cohort going to university and it has very bad economic effects. If you really believed in equality then 100%, not 50% would have to go.

One of the better arguments the late Brian Barry used to develop was that official doctrines of equality generally have the ideological function of justifying inequalities. Thus Communism had special shops for its upper class, the idea of racial equality is used to justify "positive" discrimination, multicultural equality aids the repression of Muslim women, bankers and footballers with ridiculous incomes can mumble about equality of opportunity. And so on – the list is too depressing to extend.

"The counsel of perfection is the enemy of the good". It is a hackneyed quotation and I apologise for re-issuing it. Actually, it's usually quoted as "The best is the enemy of the good", which is a translation of Voltaire's "Le mieux est l'ennemi du bien" (he was talking about the theatre). But I prefer the version Miss Keighley taught me at primary school because I have nothing against the best or even against perfection; it is incoherent and unattainable aspirations to high ideals which are the problem. Equality is the enemy of social mobility.

It could all be about to get much worse – or better. As higher fees for universities kick in this year applications are plummeting. This could mean fewer people on the right side of the glass ceiling. But it could also mean the glass ceiling eroding. I am seeing job ads – including one for the police – which insist that there is no discrimination in favour of graduates. This would be my legislative solution, to add to the prohibitions against discrimination we should have one against preferring graduates. The medics and the consumer groups might kick up a bit, but it would be worth it.

Lincoln Allison retired from an academic career at the University of Warwick in 2004 - and again in 2008 - to become a freelance writer and broadcaster. He remains Emeritus Reader in Politics at the University of Warwick and Visiting Professor in sport and leisure at the University of Brighton. His latest book is My Father's Bookcase: A Version of the History of Ideas, also available as a Kindle download from amazon.co.uk and from amazon.com.

The Manager of the England football team resigns because he is not allowed to have the captain he wants because his choice has been accused of racism. A cultural war breaks out between Liverpool and Manchester over the word negro (supposedly) said by a Uruguayan and a Frenchman's refused handshake. My, we have become precious and proper, haven't we? The only author who could have captured the true flavour of this politics of rude words and handshakes would have been the great, embittered Dean of Dublin, Jonathan Swift, and he's well dead.

My mind goes back to an incident in a football match a little over twenty years ago. My team, Burnley, twice Champions of England, had fallen on hard times and were doing badly in the Fourth Division. The players lacked quality and conviction. Except for two: a hard-working utility player called Roger Eli and a speedy forward called Johnny Francis. Both were Afro-English, the third and fourth black players to represent the club. (One must remember that we had had a chairman who wouldn't employ "them" at any price.) Eli appeared in defence and did some sort of last-ditch clearance which saved Burnley from conceding a goal. The old man standing next to me said, "Yon blackie is't ownly one wi any guts". He said it with the air of one who had recognised a truth that was both amazing and undeniable.

If someone supports your cause and they do it loyally and well it is very difficult to maintain any kind of racial hatred or contempt towards them. The most effective mechanism for eroding prejudice is surely the experience of other people and the acquired knowledge that they can be decent and intelligent and humorous – or not - in the same proportions as your own kind.

Zigger-Zagger-Zigger
X is a nigger
Chim-chiminee-chim-chiminee-chim-chim-cheroo
X and Y were bought from the zoo

Chim-chiminee-chim-chiminee-chim-chim-cheree
X and Y were found up a tree

Teammates: Never.

Fans of their own team: Never.

Fans of their opponents: Always and virulent.

Opponents: Frequently, but usually good-humoured. John Francis recalls saying to an opposition defender after half an hour,

Are you feeling OK? I’ve been running past you for thirty minutes and you haven't once said I was a black bastard.

The idea that sport has been generally good for race relations is an orthodox one among politicians and sportspersons. I think it is right, but agreeing with it let me in for some fairly vitriolic criticism in the academic world.

Among left-wing sociologists the alternative orthodoxy was that sport at best had no effect on perceptions of race and that it probably did damage in most cases by reinforcing racial stereotypes. This was borrowed from an American thesis that professional sports merely confirmed an image of black physicality. It is to be found, for example, in my friend John Hoberman's book

Darwin's Athletes: How Sport Has Damaged Black America and Preserved the Myth of Race

American sport is about specialisation and physical superlatives; cricket and football are about character. When you saw Roger Eli, a man of average height and build - though (obviously) of above average athletic ability - showing his qualities of leadership and his never-say-die attitude you admired him as a person. The same was true when you saw Clive Lloyd showing supreme judgement as a top-order batsman and a captain at cricket; he was, after all, occupying the roles previously reserved for officers and gentlemen.

The American thesis argued that racism is buried deep in the culture because it was a legacy of slavery and slavery was a defining experience of American identity. In Britain the supposed defining experience was Empire. But the alternative thesis I would suggest is that the English racism I have described, for all its appalling vitriol, was actually very superficial and part of a system of banter. After all, our sense of identity is not essentially tied to race as it is in many cultures. Banter isn't usually nice and certainly isn't always harmless, but for the most part the best response is not to take trivial things seriously. (As I write Tottenham fans are asking - in song - "What's it like to shag a sheep?" of Stevenage fans just because they don’t live in London.)

I think Eli and Francis's accounts of what they experienced supports my argument as does the virtual disappearance of racist expressions from English stadia. I admired the players of the Eli and Francis generation with their cool contempt for abuse. Who looks stupid now, them or the white racists? I am less impressed by a thin-skinned younger generation. By analogy we have moved from the heroic era in which Christianity fought to survive and to establish itself on to an era of holier-than-thou and debates about the correct number of angels to fit on the head of a pin.

Lincoln Allison retired from an academic career at the University of Warwick in 2004 - and again in 2008 - to become a freelance writer and broadcaster. He remains Emeritus Reader in Politics at the University of Warwick and Visiting Professor in sport and leisure at the University of Brighton. His latest book is My Father's Bookcase: A Version of the History of Ideas, also available as a Kindle download from amazon.co.uk and from amazon.com.

The media are awash with discussions of the emerging power of Russia and China, and the relative decline of the occident. This is usually regarded as a matter for the big players, such as the United States or the European Union. Even in little Norway, however, the national security establishment is increasingly exercised by what the perceived shift of power from west to east of the past decade portends for them.

The most immediate threat to the country today is geographically remote but economically and politically close: China. A few years ago, the Nobel Institute infuriated Beijing by awarding the dissident Lu Xiabao the Peace Prize. This is not in fact in the gift of the Oslo government, but given that the nominating committee is largely made up of parliamentarians, some of them very senior figures, it is hardly surprising that China has held the whole country responsible for the humiliation.

Since then, Norwegian diplomats and politicians have been completely frozen out by China; bilateral relations have ground to a complete halt. More seriously, Norwegian commerce has been systematically discriminated against. Their salmon ships find themselves mysteriously held up by customs, until the cargo has rotted and must be destroyed. To a small country which is not a member of the European Union, and which feels vulnerable in the global market place, this treatment is nothing short than bullying.

Just across the border, in huge, remote and largely unpopulated north-eastern Finnmark Province, Norway faces a threat of a different type: a Russia which has been become ever more assertive ever since the rise of Vladimir Putin just over a decade ago. The local Russian superiority in infantry and armoured vehicles is massive. Here Norway's public and prominent commitment to total nuclear disarmament - as its planners well know - runs contrary to her deepest security interests. Only NATO's atomic weapons can compensate for local tactical inferiority.

Oslo was jolted out of its complacency by the Georgian crisis of 2008. First, because it suddenly realized that it might be in the firing line if the Americans had decided to escalate, provoking a still stronger Russian response. Secondly, because it exploded Norwegian assumptions that helping the Americans in Iraq and Afghanistan - as both they and the Georgians had - would earn them bonus points to be expended on their own defence; indeed, the Georgians were not able to recall their men overseas in time to make any difference a home.

Moreover, what is the position in the resource-rich northern archipelago of Svalbard-Spitzbergen, which is claimed by Norway but is not automatically covered by article five, and which is where the Russians might push the envelope first? There is now more doubt than at anytime since the founding of NATO in 1949, and where there is uncertainty there is insecurity.

The story is not all doom and gloom. Norway has a capable airforce with new jets and an astonishingly large - for its size - submarine force of six vessels. Moreover, the end of the Cold War has allowed an unprecedented level of Scandinavian defence cooperation between Norway, Sweden, Finland, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia. Naval and Air dominance in the Baltic is assured, at least for now. However, Norwegian planners worry that the resulting emphasis on manoeuvre and flexibility, at the expense of less glamorous infantry, artillery and tank formations, reduce the army's ability to hold ground and thus deter attack.

Against this background, Norwegians are taking a fresh look at their security. Some call for a new bilateral security treaty with the United States outside of NATO in which their needs are explicitly listed and met - a bad sign for the standing of the alliance, and probably not achievable. Others argue that only membership of the European Union will give Norway the economic weight to deter Chinese discrimination - a hard sell in a country where public opinion shifted decisively against Brussels with the Eurocrisis.

Others still, objecting to the securitisation of relations with Russia, are examining cross-border relations between Russia and China in the Far East as a model for possible cooperation between the Finnmark city of Kirkenes and Murmansk. It has to be said, though, that the experience of effectively visa free travel in the Far East in the 1990s was not a happy one and was soon brought to an end by Moscow due to fear of Chinese infiltration; something similar may happen between tiny Kirkenes and massive Murmansk.

All this should not be a matter of indifference for the rest of Europe. A Russo-Norwegian confrontation in the Far North would be a huge international crisis. Besides Norway is the Union's fifth largest trading partner, after the United States, China, Russia and Switzerland. Moreover, most of this is oil, so that the prospect of securing a new and growing energy supply within the Union through Norwegian membership is not to be sniffed at. This means that the west too needs to start thinking more systematically about a part of Old Europe, where - to adapt Sarah Palin's immortal phrase, one can see Russia from one's window, and China through one's bank account.

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.

But remembering - that was different. Suppose you set a test of two conditions: you must remember the occasion of learning and you must remember the content. This would, for example, disqualify Colonel Arthur Huck, chemistry teacher. I remember quite vividly the absolute silence which fell as he conducted an experiment which, if it went wrong, would (so he said) blow the building sky high and like as not subject us to death by falling masonry. But I have no idea what the experiment was about and I can hardly recall any chemistry.

My wife, herself a former head teacher, said she had nothing which passed this test. She went to a convent and it's all a blur, she says, of nuns reading out of textbooks and passing out warnings of what was going to have to be mastered for O level and then A level. I calculate that most people receive something of the order of five thousand hours of instruction if they go the distance through secondary school and perhaps another five hundred if they go on to university and it seems a pity if there is nothing really memorable in all this. Well, I was much luckier in my time at Lancaster Royal Grammar School and University College, Oxford and on sitting down to reflect I could come up with several memorable lessons which passed both tests:

The English Civil War: Mr Eric Andrews - A level history
Ema, as he was known because of his initials, wrote on the board: WHIG. TORY. MARXIST. HUGH TREVOR-ROPER and then proceeded to explain that the war looked quite different from different angles, depending on what you were looking at and for. It was not an event, but a huge number of events, the relative importance of which depended on your point of view. Of course it was really a lesson in the nature of history rather than about seventeenth century England. I was dead jealous of Hugh Trevor-Roper having his own theory rather than having to be part of an ism.

Gregor Mendel's Garden: Mr Robinson - first name forgotten - science component of A level General Studies
This was simultaneously science and the history of science. Through the story of the monk Mendel and his experiments with peas and fruitflies I/we understood dominant and recessive genes and got some basis for the complicated game of genetics. One can move on from this and it helps one to understand whole chunks of life, from gardening to modern history. It was particularly good for those of us who had opted out of science, however reluctantly.

Orwell, Camus and Indifference Curves: Mr Michael Hansen - A level economics
This is a bit of a cheat because it compounds a whole system of lessons. Mr Hansen (no nickname, strangely) reckoned that of the seven periods a week allocated for A level economics we only needed two to cover the syllabus. The rest were devoted to some of the better known critics and advocates of capitalism and to consideration of current affairs as represented in the Economist and the Financial Times. He also welcomed interrogation and disagreement: all in all an excellent preparation for university.

Pseudo-Morality: Alasdair MacIntyre - lecture, Oxford ethics course
MacIntyre sought to deal with the standard disagreement between those who thought that moral statements could be true or false like other statements and those who (variously) thought they couldn't because they were emotive or value judgements by saying that they could be true or false in some forms of society, but not in others. This was a kind of meta-relativism and he illustrated his argument by reference to examples ranging from the Icelandic Sagas to contemporary England. Pseudo-Morality occurred where you claimed a kind of moral objectivity that was not possible in your society. (These lectures became the basis of his books, A Short History of Ethics and After Virtue.) The lecture ended with MacIntyre rising to a crescendo and saying, "And that is why so much nonsense is talked in places like Oxford and New York" and storming out of the room. I apologise for the cliché, but he did storm out, failing to notice the standing ovation which occurred, the only one for a routine lecture I ever saw in fifty years.

Causation: How the Universe Works: Rom Harrétutorial - tutorial, philosophy of science
Rom wrote well about science, but he talked even better - in a rather hoarse voice in a New Zealand accent. This was a conversation which followed the logic of what happened if you kept on asking "Why?" as children and theoretical physicists do. You end with the absolute necessity of assuming and seeking an underlying system of regularity to the whole thing - even if you never find it, a conclusion roughly equivalent to Immanuel Kant's "synthetic a priori". This was actually a two-person tutorial, the other person being a South African Davis Cup tennis player who didn't say very much. It left me with the feeling that I may not understand much science, but I understand what science is.

Probability: (Sir) Peter Strawson - Tutorial, philosophical logic
We talked about statistical and inductive conceptions of probability and also about how we can deal with probability hypothetically and counter-factually, all largely with reference to my experiences as a card player. What was notable was that a world famous philosopher responded in detail to my essay rather than resorting to the sort of lecturette that university teachers so often come up with in tutorials and seminars. At one point he even admitted that I may have been right and himself wrong about something. The understanding of probability I gained then has informed me ever since when dealing with diverse matters such as travel routes, weather forecasts and horse races.

The most obvious thing that all of these teachers had in common was a real urge to get things across and a pleasure in doing so. This may be less true of Sir Peter who was probably happier reading, thinking and writing than he was teaching, but he was certainly prepared to engage with those who wanted to take his ideas seriously. The two institutions involved were, of course, elite institutions with a strong esprit de corps and high morale.

On reflection, I can't think of any lessons up to O level which passed my test and I have a suspicion that the school concentrated its brightest and best at the sixth form level. They did not then have to contend with league tables and Oxbridge entry was probably the statistic which most interested the authorities. But the whole question of marks and grades was totally peripheral to the educational mission. For the most part we were off-piste, trying to understand the world rather than pass exams. Sir Peter, especially, would not have ranked highly when it came to covering the syllabus.

Which raises the question of whether this kind of teaching is still possible in the much more bureaucratised and prescribed schools of half a century later. Since two of my sons teach the equivalent of sixth form I had a ready source of information and opinion. What I got back from them shows a remarkable degree of consensus, given two very different people in quite different schools:

The official orthodoxy is entirely friendly to the sort of teaching I have praised. It says that pupils must be taught to learn for themselves and not just to regurgitate material. That is how you are taught to teach and that is what OFSTED are looking for. But the actual system of education militates against its own expressed beliefs because the exams do not really reward anything other than playing safe and good grades are a norm and a necessity rather than something you aspire to.

The greatest obstacles to real learning and teaching have been internalised by the pupils themselves. The first is the instrumentality they have absorbed from parents and careers officers which says that education is entirely about getting good marks in order to get good jobs. It is all too easy to say that instrumentality of that kind is irrational, that the learning process is both more effective and more enjoyable if you treat it as an end-in-itself – but saying doesn't change anything. And the second problem is that there is no reading habit; apparently, no seventeen-year-olds sit contentedly reading through the whole of a serious book these days as I did simply because it was one of the many things I enjoyed.

Even so, the consensus is that imaginative and effective teaching can be done. The International Baccalaureate offers more scope than A level, not least because it has no equivalent of A/S level. (This comes as rather a shock to someone of my generation, brought up to regard the French style of education as more prescribed and bureaucratised than our own!) But there was no shortage of examples of teaching which sounded interesting.

The Spanish teacher reported showing his pupils a video of a football fan ranting as River Plate crashed to defeat; the words were written down and translated - a translation involving lots of new words - and a discussion followed of why it is in Buenos Aires that insulting a man's sister is so much more telling than insulting the man himself.

The teacher of religion and philosophy reported getting students to talk about the nature of organised religion by asking them to devise an advertisement for church attendance. In both cases even the mere reporting of the idea started me thinking and I would like to believe that they are the sort of experiences which will be remembered in fifty years' time. But perhaps I'm just being a proud father?

Lincoln Allison retired from an academic career at the University of Warwick in 2004 - and again in 2008 - to become a freelance writer and broadcaster. He remains Emeritus Reader in Politics at the University of Warwick and Visiting Professor in sport and leisure at the University of Brighton. His latest book is My Father's Bookcase: A Version of the History of Ideas, also available as a Kindle download from amazon.co.uk and from amazon.com.