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In novels such as these the events - usually sparse - are the hooks from which the novelist suspends the web of the moral world he has woven. In the case of Love and Summer, it is a moral world shaped by the inheritance of calamity, be it Dillahan's accidental killing of his wife and child, or Miss Connulty's being bullied into having an abortion after the sole sexual encounter of her life (p. 88):

Her fury had quietened but still was there, as the dead days of finished time were, and tears no longer shed

She had known what she was doing in giving herself to Arthur Tetlow, and regretted only that she had remained in a house she should not have remained in.

Or so they seem. But as Florian and Ellie learn, even the actions we undertake with pure, or at least partly pure, intentions can turn out very differently. The nuns who sent Ellie to work for Dillahan were motivated only by charity. And yet, as Florian reflects (p. 127),

all that shouldn't have happened, . . . she shouldn’t have been sent into the employ of a haunted man

he felt that he belonged in his own created world of predators, that he was himself a variation of their cruelty. He had taken what there was to take, had exorcized, again, his nagging ghost. And doing so, in spite of tenderness, in spite of affection for a girl he hardly knew, he had made a hell for her.

The last of Ireland is taken from him, its rocks, its gorse, its little harbours, the distant lighthouse. He watches until there is no land left, only the sunlight dancing over the sea.

The power of this novella is produced by Trevor's style, which is in some ways a medium in which the customary resources of Irish prose - the pyrotechnics, the poeticisms - have been shunned in favour of simple sentences and simple diction. It is disarming in all senses. A particular forte, however, is an ability to register the suddenness of things, as for instance when Dillahan has a flashback to the moment of the accident when he killed his wife and child (p. 23) -

Again the accident was there, suddenly, the way it always came. The thump there'd been, the moment of bewilderment, the sun in the yard as fierce as it was today, the moment of realizing.

His Italian mother would have smoked cigarettes, a tall, still beautiful woman: out of nowhere that image came.

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

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The second field Burrow tilled was the history of historiography, and it was here that he truly excelled. A Liberal Descent: Victorian Historians and the English Past (1981) won the Wolfson Prize and showcased Burrow's gifts of mind and pen perhaps better than any other. His brief study of Gibbon in the Oxford "Past Masters" series (1985) remains the best short introduction to its subject, while the autumnal A History of Histories (2007) allowed Burrow to decant the fruit of a lifetime's reading and reflection into a series of essays to delight the general reader, but by which the scholar might also be guided and illuminated.

The obliquity of history as a form, pursuing as it does analytic ends by means of narrative, was well-adapted to the sinuousness of Burrow's mind (always an amusing contrast with his exceptionally un-sinuous body). A man of the broadest literary culture, he responded instinctively and precisely to the literary qualities in historical writing.

At the same time, he could be tenacious in sensing and pursuing the intellectual import of historiography. Rarest of all, he was alert to how those two aspects of historical writing might reinforce (or in some cases, fail to reinforce) one another. Histories were also better suited to Burrow's humanity, to his un-doctrinaire instincts, and to his simple curiosity, than was the more austere (or perhaps I mean simply thinner and duller) world of the abstract intellect.

Two days before Burrow died his family and friends held a party to celebrate the publication of his memoirs, Memories Migrating: An Autobiography (2009) - a work which deftly settles some old scores without rancour, but with precision. Burrow's last scholarly publication, however, was his selection from Macaulay, which he prefaced with a brief but excellent introduction.

Macaulay brought out the best in Burrow. The section on that great Victorian in A Liberal Descent is an exceptional act of imaginative and intellectual recovery which wonderfully eludes the Scylla of eulogy and the Charybdis of lampoon - opposed but also conjoined pitfalls which have, one way or the other, claimed so many of those who preceded Burrow on this subject. Macaulay is harder to write about than, say, Gibbon, even though he is, intellectually-speaking, a much less demanding writer. In Gibbon's case, the magnificence of the intellectual equipment is so self-evident and undeniable that this restricts the role of the commentator to informed admiration. Macaulay's mind was blunt and coarse in comparison with that of Gibbon (as whose is not?), and this makes it harder to do him justice.

Burrow's introduction scatters insights before its readers on Macaulay's style ("a prose that seeks to overwhelm rather than insinuate"), on his politics of reform as the prudent alternative to revolution, and most persuasively of all on Macaulay's interpretation of the role of the historian as an "impresario . . . of dramatic action". The central contention of the essay, that Macaulay invites his readers to join him in "a common jubilation, not a covert smile", is crystallised and sealed by means of a comparison with Bagehot. Both writers, as Burrow points out, were aware that the constitution contained within it a good amount of fiction and pretence.

Macaulay, mindful always of the cross-Channel comparison, and chastened by the thought of the French Revolution and its excesses, believed that the "antique façade was functional and worth preserving. The alternative was the tabula rasa confronted by the French National Assembly". Bagehot, who had studied Macaulay and whose essays he often cites, phrased the "central Whig paradox" in a more cynical way: "it is necessary to keep up the ancient show while we interpolate the new reality". There is no doubt where Burrow's own sane sympathies lay in this choice of Whiggisms.

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

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This view may yet be proven right, I suppose; although it seems to exaggerate the degree of consistency or co-ordination we require in the various areas of our lives, and so to underestimate the amount of cognitive dissonance we can stomach. It also forgets that the purchase of social control at the expense of the material pampering of the populace is a strategy of administration which goes back to the Roman imperial principle of "panem et circenses".

True, it has never been attempted on the scale that is now being pursued by the Chinese, and a lesson of history is that, when the flow of bread and circuses dries up - as at some point it always does - then things take an ugly turn. But that ugly turn might just as easily be a revival of old hard-line Communism as a lurch towards liberal democracy and political pluralism. History, as we are experiencing on a daily basis, only rarely takes the form of a straight-line graph.

Archie Brown's massive, richly-documented but also exceptionally readable account of the rise and fall of Communism has thus arrived at a propitious moment, when the apocalyptic claims of both Western capitalism and Communism look vulnerable, even foolish. His book offers a richly-informed meditation on the three central questions posed by this subject. How, and from where, did the political and economic theory of Communism arrive? How did the régimes which called themselves Communist sustain themselves? And finally, how and why did the Communist régimes of Eastern Europe crumble when they did?

The early chapters of the book show how, not so much the details of Marx's theories, but the emotional and intellectual impulses by which those theories were fuelled, emerged from a rich soil of political thought and social aspiration reaching back into antiquity. The ideal of society defined by the common ownership of goods and the absence of social classification did not of course arise with Marx. But Marx, because of the economic circumstances by which he was surrounded and the developments in European philosophy in the preceding century, was able to give that perennial aspiration a new and more plausible shape. He elevated it from the status of a human yearning to that of the meaning of the historical process itself, and in so doing transformed it into a call to practical action, rather than merely a topic for melancholy rumination.

When it comes to how the Communist régimes of Eastern Europe sustained themselves, notwithstanding the evident failure of their economic policies, Brown acknowledges that a great part of the answer is to be found in the obvious place, namely "in the political resolve and military power of the USSR" (p. 574). But he also draws attention to other, softer, aspects of these societies which usefully enrich Orwell's too-memorable image of a boot stamping on the face of mankind. Alongside the techniques of repression, Communist societies also offered rewards and inducements, often flimsy or less tangible than the douceurs of Western democracies, it is true, but nevertheless effective in keeping the level of discontent below the critical point.

Turning to the demise of Communism in Europe, Brown pours cold water on the triumphalist interpretation of 1989, namely that the events of that year were economically-determined, and that the creaking economies of Eastern Europe simply could not hold on any longer. Instead, he draws attention to the way in which that change had been prepared for from within, rather than imposed from without (p. 583):

A Communist system could not have continued in the Soviet Union for ever - no system lasts for ever - but it could have continued for significantly longer than it did if fundamental reform had not been undertaken.

After muddling through the remaining years of the twentieth century, a Soviet Union which had not changed the fundamentals of the political system would have benefited from the huge increase in energy prices which did so much to bolster the economy of post-Soviet Russia and the popularity of Vladimir Putin.

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

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There is a more particular concern with scope because the understanding of the subject today has clear political resonances, and both understanding and resonances owe much to the scope of what is covered and the respective weight given to particular narratives. Thus, for example, the coverage in Britain at the time of the bicentenary of the abolition of the slave trade in 2007 was singularly depressing because most of the story was of Britain's past, for both good and ill, and there was singularly little attempt by most commentators to devote due weight to international comparisons.

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

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

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

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

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What is a person "openly living with HIV/AIDS?" Does it mean someone not only infected with HIV or suffering from AIDS, but trumpeting it abroad? Or can it in include someone living with a person of that description, and trumpeting it abroad?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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No doubt it is in the nature of such propositions that they can be neither conclusively proved nor conclusively disproved. Perhaps Mr Hoffman is right and perhaps he is wrong; but in the particular circumstances of Northern Rock I should have thought that discretion is the better part of expenditure. Besides, the onus of proof surely rests on Mr Hoffman rather than those who do not agree with him in his calculations. If Mr Hoffman had wanted to use his own salary to subsidise Newcastle United Football Club that would have been his own affair; but that he should have seen fit to do so with even an infinitesimal sum of my money seems to me an arrogant outrage.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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It isn't, of course, what the journalists and politicians mean in any case: they mean that the young should be looking up to the likes of John Terry and Wayne Bridge for their virtuous qualities. The only interesting thing about this absurdity is the question of how it came to be believed in the first place and I would argue that it is one of the legacies of our "amateur hegemony" which leads us to expect that athletes should be noble Athenian all-rounders rather than Roman gladiators.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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What was so remarkable about Foot's position was the fact that Croatia was then more usually the butt of left-wing contempt in Britain. Admittedly not helped by the belligerent nationalism of President Franjo Tudjman, the prevailing view of Foot's associates was that as the former genocidal ally of Nazi Germany in World War II, Croatia had fascism written into its DNA. So the former Labour leader was very much in a minority when he insisted from the start - rightly - that the war which broke out in the summer of 1991 was no desperate act of self-defence, but a carefully planned project of ethnic displacement sponsored by Slobodan Milosevic in Belgrade. Foot's activism here was matched by his late wife, Jill Craigie whose searing documentary about the Bosnian war Two Hours from London was first screened in Zagreb in November 1994.

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

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

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

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

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

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Nor should it be clouded by the issue of whether or not British soldiers, or ministers, might end up before an international court for waging "aggressive war". It was for this very reason that many were sceptical of the International Criminal Court, which would only constrain those capable of global policing, and leave the real transgressors unpunished. The problem with those who applauded Ms Wilmshurst is that they believe that the juridification of political, strategic and moral issues take the pain and uncertainty out of difficult decisions, and lifts them to a higher "safe" and "legal" plane.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Treason doth never prosper.

What's the reason?

Why if it prospers, none dare call it treason.

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

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At the time of writing in 1923, all this was quite shocking. Nowadays, of course, rather like Brecht and Pirandello – whose mould-breaking Six characters in search of an author toured recently – the material seems much more routine. All the same, Bruckner's work is little known in Anglophone circles, and this recent revival by Katie Mitchell at the National Theatre using the translation by Martin Crimp is thus welcome in itself.(Faber and Faber should correct the text of the play on sale, however: Passau is no German "village" but one of the larger towns in Bavaria) The staging is superb, with an antiseptic set which accentuates the pervading sense of alienation. All the props, for example, are wrapped in a transparent disinfecting foil, which robotic stagehands whip off just before the start of each scene. The performances are generally very good - some of them such as Laura Elphinstone's Marie are electric.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The argument over religion makes good copy and is easy for the readers of newspapers to understand and get indignant about. Everybody on this subject can have an opinion. But in focussing on such questions as whether the Catholic Church should be forced to have women priests it is easy to lose sight of the main mischief of this Bill: the intrusion of a bureaucratic monster, the Equality and Human Rights Commission, into offices, bed and breakfast establishments, even perhaps open air markets.

Many people have been unaware that in 2007 the Equality and Human Rights Commission was set up as a result of the Equality Act 2006. It was supposedly designed to ensure that there is "mutual respect between communities based on understanding and valuing of diversity and on shared respect for equality and human rights". A community was defined as a group or class of persons sharing common attributes such as age, gender, race, religion or belief and sexual orientation, even persons undergoing gender change. A group could be labelled as a community even if they did not identify themselves as a separate group. Our population was to be seen as divided into different groups, even when a group of people might not wish to be considered in this way.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The US borrowed English conservatism, and Big Government
I suspect that it is important not to be misled by the ease with which an American writer like Mr Tanenhaus refers to British conservatism. Mind you, he's in a decent tradition. Reba N Soffer has already given us History, Historians, and Conservatism in Britain and America: From the Great War to Thatcher and Reagan, and its thesis is mostly that American intellectual conservatism is a translation - even a direct copy - of much British thought. Soffer's book and Tanenhaus's jive well together because the former is an account of almost academic arguments and the latter tells us a lot about how these themes play out in practical politics.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The stated thesis of the book is that mankind is not good at spotting the really huge events which will blast out of the future and change everything. These are low probability, high impact events represented by, say, Chernobyl. We don't see them coming, says, Mr Taleb, because we have all sorts of mental habits which make us think life is a series of rather normal events. We reduce complex things to simplicities, "so we can squeeze them into our heads". The process means that we have a strong tendency "to think the world is less random than it actually is".

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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It would have been interesting to hear Mr Gladwell's view on whether some societies nurture both general well-being and exceptional outliers. Sometimes, he is discussing why whole societies or classes produce certain generalised effects (the southern Chinese and maths, say), and it takes a moment to remind ourselves that he hasn't told us anything about what he is supposed to be discussing (let's say, whether there are southern Chinese outliers). So some of his best pages aren't exactly about his declared subject.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Samuel Smiles would have loved this book.

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

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She demonstrates her range particularly well in Act Five. Invited by Alceste to throw up her life of pleasure and glamour and join him in what he proposes as a bucolic idyll -

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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I was caned regularly from 1957 to 1961, the latter year containing both my fifteenth birthday and the retirement of an elderly, traditionalist headmaster (whose liberal successor we loathed). When I say "regularly" I should think the average was about twice a week. Cheek. Insolence. Chucking things at the staff. Disobedience. I often think that debates about punishment are fundamentally flawed in the same way as debates about hooliganism because they are conducted by nice people who consider bad behaviour as "deviant" rather than by people like me who consider it to be entirely natural.

So what was good about it? The place was orderly, for a start, and gave you plenty of space to work and play. I received a very good education, far better than is even possible in most contemporary comprehensive schools. And nobody tried to reform you or get under your skin: I don't think I could have tolerated being reasoned with. If you don't chastise children you have to shame them, which is bad if it doesn't work and worse if it does.

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

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

The trick is . . . not minding that it hurts

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

Spare the rod and spoil the child

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

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

the descent from thinking to feeling.

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

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Moreover, we still know too little of Mr Brown. It may be that he takes Washington by storm, but the media experience with Sarah Palin (very unfairly traduced in my view) should make us cautious about the chances of untested populist protest candidates.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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I have observed this haste in imposing fines twice before. Once I stopped outside a hotel at which I was going to stay, to take in my luggage (the nearest available parking place being several hundred yards off). I received a ticket within two minutes, while I was at the hotel reception, and when I protested - the officer was perfectly aware that I was parking only to unload, for the door of my car was open and I had stopped in a way, by no means obstructive to others, which made it perfectly clear I had no intention of staying long - I was told that I ought to have had my warning lights flashing. That was the proper procedure for unloading, according to regulations.

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

I had another very similar experience to the one above.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The Tigers were weakened by an internal split which reduced their fighting strength by a third. The breakaway faction of eastern Tamils became allies of the government, working closely with the army and contributing both manpower and intelligence. The regime was successful at building relations with friendly nations notably Iran, China, Russia, Pakistan and Burma from whom they gained crucial financial, political and military support. In a post 9/11 world the LTTE were finding it harder to channel funds and arms shipments to Sri Lanka while Rajapakse was expanding and modernizing the armed forces. Sri Lanka is now proportionately the most militarized society in the region with the army, navy, air force, police and civil defence numbering 350,000 in a population of around 20 million.

Once hostilities resumed in earnest there were no half-measures. White van squads began operating and suspected LTTE operatives and sympathisers disappeared in increasing numbers. Dissenting voices in the media were muted by a series of abductions, assaults and murders. Despite occasional setbacks on the battlefield and a wave of terrorist outrages the momentum was with the Sri Lankan forces. In May 2009, on a narrow strip of territory in the east between the coast and a lagoon the remnants of the LTTE were killed or captured and the entirety of the senior leadership perished. The precise civilian death toll in this final phase is disputed, but was inevitably high, the UN estimates 7,000 fatalities.

After the initial euphoria had subsided and the victory parades were over, tensions quickly developed between the Rajapakse family and the former army commander. With no conflict to engender cohesion, injured sensibilities and bitter rivalries soon surfaced. The Rajapakse’s were concerned that their political hegemony might be threatened by an increasingly powerful military. At the end of the conflict Sarath Fonseka was appointed Chief of the Defence Staff, an apparent elevation but in fact the move weakened his control over the army. As his relations deteriorated with the government, the General opted to retire. He was offered a public servants role in the sports ministry, which he turned down as a humiliating slight. His personal security was drastically reduced, further evidence of what he considered degrading treatment. Fonseka was ordered to promptly vacate his official residence and when he did not do so, a large contingent of troops was sent to his home on the pretext of looking for army deserters.

In December Fonseka announced his candidature for the Presidency. It is unclear whether Fonseka's motivation is ego or a principled opposition to the government. He is promising to eliminate corruption and promote ethnic harmony, media freedom, and human rights. Fonseka has also announced his intention to abolish the Executive Presidency, which concentrates power in the hands of the President at the expense of Parliament. Many are indeed concerned that the present constitutional arrangement has led to a dangerous accretion of power in one office and has the potential to pave the way for autocratic and ultimately even dynastic rule.

The government has levelled corruption allegations against the General, claiming that in military procurement he favoured a company owned by his son-in-law. Cabinet spokesman Minister Anura Priyadharshana Yapa alleges that Fonseka became angry with the President's brother, Gotabhaya Rajapaksa, the Defence Secretary, when in August he refused his request for the purchase $222,392,635 of military equipment from China, Fonseka strenuously denies the accusation.

As Army Commander, Fonseka had made menacing pronouncements against the media. On January 2 2009, in an interview in the state-controlled Sinhala daily, Dinamina, while army commander, he called unnamed journalists "traitors" and referred to the "treachery" of the media. He claimed that the biggest obstacle to defeating the LTTE was the unpatriotic media. For some time Sri Lanka has been one of the most hostile country's in which to be a journalist. Six days after Fonseka's published comments, on January 8 2009 the Editor of the Sunday Leader, Lasantha Wickrematunge, was shot dead. The paper is best known for its investigations into corruption in high places and while unsympathetic to the LTTE was critical of aspects of the war's conduct.

Two days prior to Wickrematunge's assassination, the Sirasa television station on the outskirts of Colombo had been stormed and set alight. State media had specifically criticised Sirasa for giving disproportionate coverage to a suicide bombing in Colombo, diverting attention from a speech made by the President lauding the capture of the Tiger capital, Killinochchi on the same day. No progress has been made in finding the perpetrator of either crime which has been the pattern for all other attacks on the media. Reporters Without Frontiers has claimed that 30 journalists have fled Sri Lanka in the last year.

Ethnic minorities, especially Tamils and Muslims, will need some convincing that the General is the man to deliver ethnic harmony. His choice of language in an interview with the Canadian National Post in September 2008 was at best grudging.

I strongly believe that this country belongs to the Sinhalese but there are minority communities and we treat them like our people. We being the majority of the country, 75%, we will never give in and we have the right to protect this country. We are also a strong nation ... They can live in this country with us. But they must not try to, under the pretext of being a minority, demand undue things.

The largest Muslim party, the Sri Lankan Muslim Congress (SLMC) supports Fonseka and has significant support amongst the 8% of the population who are Muslim. After much soul searching the Western Peoples Front (WPF), a small Tamil party has decided to campaign for Fonseka. The WPF is led by Mano Ganeshan, a human rights activist who has worked at great risk to himself on behalf of the families of the abducted.

The Tamil National Alliance (TNA) a coalition of four Tamil groupings was close to the Tigers. It represents lowland Tamils who form 12% of the population. To win the TNA's support Fonseka has pledged to repeal the state of emergency in place since March 1983, that gives powers to arrest and detain terrorist suspects without trial. He has offered an amnesty to captured LTTE cadres and to dismantle the High Security Zones in the north occupied by the armed forces. The government alleges that Fonseka has struck a secret deal to re-merge the Eastern and Northern provinces, a key demand of the LTTE.

The Tamil vote may be crucial. In the 2005 election a margin of only 2% separated Rajapakse and his UNP opponent Ranil Wickremesinghe. The LTTE had instructed Tamils in the North and East to abstain and in Tiger strongholds few dared disobey. This deprived the opposition candidate of vital Tamil votes that the UNP could normally have counted on in a presidential election and almost certainly opened the door for a Rajapakse victory. It is hard to estimate how exactly the Tamil vote may influence the outcome this time. The President is himself supported by some smaller Tamil parties. Many Tamils may abstain, unenthusiastic about voting for the army commander that led the military campaign against the LTTE and still less for the President who directed it.

The intense fighting that took place in the final stages of the war created around 280,000 Internally Displaced People (IDP) .They were housed in temporary camps run by the military and it is estimated that 100,000 are yet to be re-settled. Given the considerable displacement of the local population concern has been expressed that many will not be registered or possess an Identity Card enabling them to vote.

The main election monitoring NGOs have complained that the authorities have done insufficient to ensure the affected population will be able to exercise their franchise. The Campaign for Free and Fair Elections (CAFFE), estimates that out of approximately 271,000 IDPs eligible to vote, only around 13,700 are registered. The wisdom of calling an election two years early is questionable when a proportion of the people that the government fought to liberate will possibly be excluded from the democratic process.

As is customary during a Sri Lankan election, a number of individual politicians have switched allegiance. Two UNP politicians who recently joined the Rajapakse camp were immediately rewarded with ministerial posts. S.B.Dissanayake, a national organizer of the opposition UNP has switched sides just as he did at an earlier election in 2001 when making a different calculation about the swing of the political pendulum. The former Captain of Sri Lanka's 1996 cricket world cup winning team, Arjuna Ranatunga, a member of the President's Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP), is campaigning for the General.

A prominent Buddhist monk involved with the hardline and Sinhalese nationalist, Patriotic National Centre (PNC) has endorsed the General after previously supporting the President. At a media briefing the Dambara Amila Thera said:

There is no media freedom, there are no free and fair elections in the country and there are too many problems in the IDP camps. Over 50 people die every day in the IDP camps.

Three parliamentarians of the Ceylon Workers Congress (CWC) including a Deputy Minister have broken ranks with their leadership and are campaigning for Fonseka. The CWC represents Tamil workers of Indian descent who largely work on the plantations in the hill country and make up 5% of the population.

Hardly had Fonseka's candidacy been declared when the campaign became mired in a controversy that has yet to subside. In an interview published on December 13, in the Sunday Leader, the General reportedly said that in the final stages of the conflict Gotabayha Rajapakse had ordered that neither the LTTE leaders nor their families were to be taken prisoner, even though they were attempting to give themselves up. The government response concentrated less on rebuttal than on portraying the allegations as treacherous and sullying the nations image abroad. They represented a betrayal of Gotabayha, the President and the armed forces, that left them open to war crimes charges.

The failure to anticipate how his remarks would be exploited was indicative of the Generals lack of political experience. The resulting furore compelled Fonseka to hurriedly claim misrepresentation. The highly respected and senior journalist, Federica Janz, stands by her story. In his subsequent clarification Fonseka said that he had only heard from a journalist embedded with the army of attempts by the LTTE leadership to surrender and that while he was in charge of conducting the final operation no request to surrender had reached him and hence the army had never acted unlawfully.

The General Secretary of the ruling SLFP, Maithripala Sirisena, alleged that Fonseka has now become a pawn in the hands of some western nations "conspiring" to bring "regime change" in Sri Lanka. Fonseka has wryly observed that:

Before I handed over the nomination I was the best army commander in the world, but after that I was the country's number one traitor.

The Rajapakse regime is certainly taking the challenge posed by the Fonseka candidacy seriously. The electorate have been offered a range of economic inducements. Petrol and bottled gas prices have been reduced. On orders from the President, import duty on wheat sugar and onions has been lowered to reduce prices of those staples. Rajapakse has claimed that he has received information that business men associated with the UNP were engineering a shortage in the rice market. Correspondingly he has ordered the importation of extra stocks at preferential rates to keep the price down.

Wages for public servants have been raised including the police and military. Pensions for service personnel have been increased substantially and the elderly are to be entitled to a 20% bonus on the interest they receive from their savings. Farmers are also enjoying the election time spree having seen the price of fertilizer reduced and rates for agricultural credit clipped. Fonseka is responding by making some similarly expensive promises that a fragile economy with a high level of public borrowing can ill afford.

With access to vastly greater finance, media advertising and hoardings supporting the President far outnumber those for Fonseka. Electoral law stipulates that hoardings and posters can be displayed only in the vicinity of party offices and at political meetings but the law has been flagrantly ignored. The Head of the Police has said that the President instructed the police to remove all illegal publicity from the streets before nomination day on the 17th December, but the illegal publicity is still in place.

The People's Action for Free and Fair Elections (PAFFREL) is deeply unsatisfied that the law is being flouted. A police officer in the eastern town of Ampara has been transferred to Kilinochchi after acting on the orders of the Election Commissioner to remove illegal hoardings. The Commissioner has responded by ordering that no public servants be victimized at election time with transfers. The Election Commissioner, Dayananda Dissanayake, gave a fresh deadline of January 7 for the hoardings to come down, which came and went.

The Elections Commissioner now appears to have given up. He has told Inspector General of Police, Mahinda Balasuriya, that he will not be making any further requests to him to uphold election laws as the police have repeatedly failed to act. He has informed political parties not to notify him of any more complaints, given his inability to take action. The electoral contest has become rather like a boxing match, with Queensbury rules, but no referee to enforce them.

The President has been lavishly entertaining large groups of lawyers, farmers, artists, three-wheeler drivers and police officers, amongst others, at his official residence, Temple Trees. His ready bonhomie and common touch are well suited to such gatherings. The participants are entertained and in some cases transported at state expense, a practice Transparency International criticized in its report of December 31. This report revealed how state finance and property are being used in contravention of electoral law, by the Rajapakse campaign.

Key to understanding the potential for abuse is that the President has made inoperative the 17th amendment to the constitution. This amendment established the principle of an independent public service whereby appointments would be screened impartially by a Constitutional Council. This Council was also to nominate members of independent Commissions on elections, police, corruption and human rights.

The President has not appointed a Constitutional Council despite a statutory obligation and the Commissions are not therefore functioning. Accordingly all public appointees, including judicial, are the result of unrestrained presidential and ministerial patronage. At election time partisan place men naturally do their masters bidding. When coupled with the fact the four Rajapakse brothers head ministries accounting for two-thirds of the national budget, the extent of the family’s control over the agencies of the state becomes apparent.

Transparency has documented a number of other areas of concern. The deployment of government sector vehicles and public buses as well as helicopters for election work has been widespread. Public institutions such as the Board of Investments, Ministry of Tourism and Ministry of Urban Development and a state retail chain, Lanka Sathosa, have placed advertisements and hoardings supporting the Presidents campaign. Money has been channeled to the youth organization Tharunyata Hetak, (Youths Future) by public bodies such as the Bank of Ceylon and the National Lotteries Board. The youth organisation is headed by the Presidents two sons and has been spending considerable amounts on advertising in support of the campaign.

The state controls a number of TV and radio stations as well as newspapers. They often have office holders from the Presidents own party in key positions and all obediently communicate the Rajapakse message. A selection of headlines from the Daily News of January 5 demonstrates the point.

President sets example

Fonseka arms deal bared

Govt never kept people hungry

A chilling video showing the alleged execution of Tiger prisoners by the army and supposedly filmed in January was screened by Channel Four in August. The footage was dismissed by the government as a fabrication after the experts it had appointed examined it. However the UN Rapporteur, Phillip Alston has said that independent analysis by US experts confirms its authenticity. Abductions and disappearances, attacks on the media and high profile incidents such as the murder of 17 local aid workers of Action Contre La Faim, have created considerable international unease regarding Sri Lanka's human rights record. To assuage international opinion the government has set up enquiries but foot-dragging, obfuscation and studied incompetence ensure no culprits have been identified and apprehended.

The response of the Sri Lankan authorities to all accusations that its personnel have committed human rights abuses has been an automatic and blanket denial. The rejection of culpability and a refusal to bow to criticism from the international community, wins approval from large sections of the domestic audience. It should certainly not be forgotten that the LTTE perpetrated appalling crimes against their own people and against the civilian population of the island. However the government's failure to take seriously allegations of human rights transgressions perpetrated by elements within its own armed forces has allowed a culture of impunity to develop increasing the likelihood of further abuses.

The European Union appears to have lost patience with the government and is moving toward suspension of an important trade concession, the Generalised System of Preferences or GSP plus. This is granted on condition that human rights norms are fulfilled. Primarily it will impact on exports from the important garment sector, for which the EU is the biggest market. The President has responded with characteristic belligerence:

We will not be held back by threatened economic sanctions or withdrawn trade concessions by those who seek strategic interference in the national affairs of Sri Lanka.

In the absence of credible opinion polls it is difficult to predict the election outcome but the incumbent has been shaken by the intensity of the contest. The General has undoubtedly rallied the previously demoralized and fragmented opposition. There is concern that the election and its aftermath maybe violent. Already rallies have been broken up and political offices burned. In Tangalle, a stronghold of the President in the south, a bus carrying Fonseka supporters came under machine gun-fire, killing one and injuring ten. Should the declared result be close and of dubious credibility, what Mahinda Rajapakse has termed the "emerging wonder of Asia" may be thrown into turmoil.

The Jaffna based group University Teachers for Human Rights (UTHR) has observed that the real issues facing Sri Lanka are being eclipsed by the squabble between the regime and the General about who can be considered the greater patriot and who deserves the major credit for achieving military victory. The UTHR believes the election should be about re-building trust between communities, devolving power and reforming the state in order to defend human rights.

Historically the Sri Lankan people have been poorly led by a self-serving political class, conspicuously unable to provide statesmanship and vision. It is hard to be optimistic that either candidate in this election can break a well established mould and deliver the reform necessary to nurture reconciliation, human rights, clean governance and development. It is earnestly to be hoped that this pessimism is misplaced as the end of the war has created a unique opportunity for the winning candidate to unleash the islands enormous potential. What has taken many by surprise is that in the aftermath of its bloody conflict that there is a fiercely contested election at all.

To read Clifford Bastin's previous reports from Sri Lanka, see Sri Lanka after the Tsunami.

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What has made all this endurable for British academics is two things. First, the very high level of job satisfaction: dons enjoy the privilege of being paid to indulge their intellectual curiosity; and - at least at many universities - they have the opportunity to interact with highly intelligent students.

Secondly, even though remuneration may be low, the working conditions are generally good. Academics enjoy an exceptionally flexible timetable; subsidised childcare is often available; and by comparison with many jobs in the "real" world, the tone and atmosphere is usually collegial. Above all, for the past twenty-five years academics have had more or less unchallenged job security, something which many began to appreciate all the more with the onset of the recession last year.

Or at least, they did. In a statement which has sent shivers down the spines of lecturers across Britain, the University of Sussex announced before Christmas that it is planning to save £5 million in 2010-2011 out of an annual turnover of £160 million, by reducing 100 posts out of 2300.

What was shocking was not so much the figures, as the intention to cut whole subject areas and courses, including - apparently - Early Modern History, because of reduced student "demand". By contrast, more would be invested in "growth" areas such as the School of Business, Management and Economics, Global Studies, and Media, Film and Music. Sussex's Vice Chancellor Professor Michael Farthing said:

I am confident that the steps we are proposing will help safeguard our future as one of the UK’s top research universities.

Let us pause for a moment to consider what dropping "Early Modern History" actually means, even if it "just" means cutting European history. No Reformation, no Thirty Years War, no Louis XIV, and perhaps not even the French Revolution. In short, no sense why Englishmen were so worried by what was happening on the other side of the channel (a very pertinent issue in Sussex especially, one might add). If the axe is to fall on Early Modern History across the board, what about the Tudors and Stuarts?

Bear in mind also, that one of the research themes currently highlighted by the University is "heritage". So no Armada or Guy Fawkes then? No Puritans sailing to America? In a managerial culture which prides itself on "joined-up thinking", it is clear that somebody has not been paying attention.

Sussex may be an extreme case, for now, but it is hardly an isolated one. The list of cut or closing departments is a depressing one: politics and philosophy at Liverpool, chemistry at Kent, physics and theology at Newcastle, chemistry at Queen Mary, to name but a few. There might be something to be said for a healthy competition in which the decline of "weak" departments was matched by the rise of "strong" rivals. It doesn't seem to work that way, however.

The vast majority of the new courses being offered at universities are "soft" subjects such as "media studies"; over the past decade the number of media studies academics has more than doubled. This trend has been encouraged by the Labour government's - in principle laudable - ambition to have 50% of young people in higher education without - inexcusably - providing the funding to make this possible without lowering standards. Subjects being cut are the "hard" ones: chemistry, physics and especially languages. One does not have to be an inveterate cultural pessimist to fear where all this will lead.

To be sure, universities face a horrific deficit, and they have to do something. Rather than running down intellectual and professional capacity which will take years to rebuild, however, they should try to spread the burden more evenly, perhaps by enacting a pay cut across the board. In Ireland, for example, where the fiscal situation is even worse, the government has simply imposed pay cuts of up to fifteen percent for the public sector. Irish academics have accepted this with comparatively few grumbles, because they know that the alternative would be job losses for their colleagues. This strategy would be costly for Professor Farthing, whose salary has just risen to £277,000 a year, but it would be an opportunity for him to lead from the front.

Otherwise, we can only hope that other British universities follow the Irish rather than the Sussex example. To do anything else might be Farthing-wise, but pound-foolish.

The author thanks Miss Katie Jenner for research carried out in support of this piece.

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