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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.

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The most recent Fledermaus, now playing at the Staatsoper on Unter den Linden, received at best an ambivalent welcome from the audience at its premiere on 21 November. Musically the performance was excellent, thanks to Zubin Mehta's direction, but the production drew as many boos as it did cheers. Christian Pade's version sets the story in present-day Berlin. Orlofsky, for example, is turned from a Russian prince into a jaded young Oligarch, who has already tired of everything the city, and life in general, can offer him. The Viennese prison warder "Frosch" is changed into a typical GDR jobsworth with a sideline in memorabilia from the time of the communist leaders Erich and Margot Honecker. The performers eat takeaways, and there is even a Botox scene, where the injection is delivered to the strains of the most famous lines of the operetta "happy is he who forgets what he cannot change".

Pade's target is bourgeois society in general and the banking sector in particular. Paper money is burnt in a rubbish-bin marked Hypo (the name of a major local bank which recently got into difficulties). Figures in bankers' pinstripe wearing placards entitled "Jump" are held up to general ridicule, and in case we didn't get the message the accompanying notes tell us that in 2008 the crowd outside the failed Lehman Brothers waved banners saying "Jump you Fuckers", in reference to the mass suicides after the Wall Street Crash of 1929.

All this is of a piece with Pade's well-known didactic yen: in November 2004, he defended his version of Beethoven's Fidelio (which included the use of gas, and the now-obligatory allusions to Guantanamo) with the observation that "ethical behaviour is a increasing a crucial parameter of aesthetics".

The reviews have been generally brutal, focussing on the chaotic modern dance (which replaced the traditional waltzes), the stilted additional dialogue and the bizarre costumes, in which Orlofsky looks like nothing so much as a Humungan from Mel Gibson's film Mad Max. Not even the "financial crisis" theme is new, since the "Boersenkrach" of 1873 is well-known to have been the background to the original staging, and it has featured strongly in productions since, most recently Thalheimer's in Berlin itself.

All these criticisms are fair, but they miss the real problem with the production. In the original the hapless Eisenstein is a "rentier", who lives from his investments; in some versions he is also a newspaper baron. There is something else about which Viennese audiences would have been aware of in the 1870s - his name, Eisenstein - marks him out as a Jew. Interestingly, the Fledermaus was made into an escapist film starring the Goebbels protege and mistress Lida Baarova in 1937, and Hitler himself was an enthusiast for Strauss's music, which he regarded as Germanic and nationalistic. There is no suggestion, however, that the composer himself was an anti-semite, and a careful study of the libretto by Karl Haffner and Richard Genee reveals no further evidence. Indeed, Strauss was a focus of Austrian patriots opposed to Hitler during the Second World, who regarded him as a negation of everything the Nazis stood for. All the same, the naming of Eisenstein cannot be coincidental, and audiences will have drawn their own conclusions.

Pade unwittingly feeds the stereotype by sending Eisenstein to jail for financial malfeasance rather than assaulting a civil servant, as was the case in the original. Eisenstein's Jewishness", thanks to the instinctive connection popularly made between Jewish and banking jiggery-pokery, is thereby enhanced. German artists have often sailed close to the wind in this respect: one thinks of Rainer Werner Fassbender's play Der Muell, die Stadt und der Tod, (The rubbish, the city and death), which targeted a notorious Jewish property developer in Frankfurt and unleashed a huge scandal when it was first performed in 1981. But they always did so knowingly, and often provocatively.

This Fledermaus is surely innocent of any such intent, and it is exactly for that reason that it should reflect on the dangers of scapegoating. The producers seek to put capitalism in the dock, but they should remember what the Social Democrat leader August Bebel called anti-semitism: "the socialism of fools".

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.

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Insofar as Betjeman had any abstract aesthetic principle, it was the one he invoked in a programme about Diss when trying to put his finger on what he particularly liked about the town (p. 194):

All this time, there's been something I haven't pointed out to you. It's the kind of thing you come to take for granted, strolling about in a town like Diss: the happy inconsequence of everything.

And now let me ask you to look at the electric light fittings. Better than those awful things like pig troughs that make the tea look like custard, aren't they? Trouble has been taken over the switch boxes. This isn't pomposity: it's delight in craftsmanship.

I'm always excited by a church I haven't seen before. What's it going to be like? That tower with its small windows, I should think, is Norman. Under these table tombs lie the bones of Georgian yeoman farmers. My goodness! - splendid windows in the nave: about 1450, from the look of them: very grand for so small a church.

the joy of being Anglican is that definitions are left, in the English way, capable of various interpretations. Love only lives in liberty.

Motor traffic. It smells nasty; it looks nasty. It's out of place in a human-scale village street. It's like a poisonous snake - a killer too. Not even a bit of nonsense like a nodding dog in the back window makes a motor car agreeable and driving a car makes the mildest man competitive and turns him into a fiend. [p. 75]

Burn them [cars] up! I mean, they're a frightful nuisance in Oxford. They shouldn’t be there. They ruin the place. The absolutely make it simply hideous, as they make every old town in England hideous. [p. 215]

Modern motor traffic is no friend to an old town. [p. 263]

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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A Week in December is a thriller with a social conscience, which in my experience normally results in something insufficiently thrilling. It follows a group of characters over seven days leading up to Christmas 2007. John Veals runs the hedge fund High Level Capital, and is planning to make billions by shorting the share price of Allied Royal Bank; meanwhile, his neglected wife anaesthetizes herself with two bottles of wine a night, and his son smokes dope of increasing strength while watching It's Madness!, a reality TV show in which psychologically unwell members of the public are locked up in a house and made to perform demeaning tasks.

Farooq al-Rashid, a millionaire chutney manufacturer, is about to receive an OBE, while (as we have seen) his shallowly-radicalized son, Hassan, has been recruited into a terrorist cell. The website through which the cell communicates is a soft porn site, and the picture they use as a message board displays Olya, who is both the girl friend of a Polish footballer newly arrived in London, Tadeusz Borowski, and the obsession of John Veals, himself a frequent visitor to the site. Ralph Tranter is a vindictive jobbing reviewer whose biography of a minor Victorian novelist is on the shortlist for a literary prize, and who is giving Farooq some last-minute coaching on English literature in case the Queen should decide to make literary small-talk when he receives his decoration.

Gabriel Northwood is a struggling barrister who is defending an Underground driver, Jenni Fortune, in a case of negligence arising from a suicide who threw himself under her train. Jenni is addicted to an alternative reality program called "Parallax", where she has an encounter with a London schoolteacher, Radley Graves. (If it was tedious to read that last paragraph, take pity on your poor reviewer.)

So much by way of dramatis personae. The novel's claim to be, not just an honest thriller, but a piece of social criticism, rests on the way its various strands of plot cohere into an indictment of what the cover blurb calls "the complex patterns and crossings of modern urban life". What does Faulks's accusation boil down to? It is that the modern world not only cannot bear very much reality, but is running as fast as possible in the other direction. A minor character, previously presented to us as a hopeless drunk, is suddenly galvanised at the dinner party at the end of the novel where most of the major characters are gathered together to denounce in precisely these terms the modern financial world which permits men like John Veals to thrive (p. 376):

. . . investment banks and hedge funds created ever more arcane instruments which they could flog to one another in a completely false market. Because it was over the counter [sic], in private, the regulator couldn’t see it. Then they could sell an inverted iceberg of bets on the likelihood of the original instruments defaulting. They were able to account a notional profit on the balance sheet on all this Alice-in-Wonderland crap and so pay themselves gargantual bonuses.

Which takes us back to that fragment of the Joni Mitchell lyric which pops up without warning in the midst of Faulks's serviceable prose, where its superior imaginative power makes it stand out like a raspberry in a bowl of porridge. For Faulks seems not to be aware of the pressures you put on yourself when you decide to run this kind of analysis of the modern world. When you do so, you implicitly claim that you are not prey to the failings you anatomize; that you, in contrast to your characters, are indeed in touch with reality, and that your mental world is not prey to the shallownesses and confusions which disfigure theirs.

Both these claims are unsustainable in a novel where all the characters come from central casting, and where snippets of songs can arise without explanation. On this showing, Faulks may not like the subtle prison of the modern world, but he has no standpoint from which to launch an authoritative critique of it. He may be rattling on the bars, but, like his characters, he has no key.

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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It would be difficult to imagine that beer or any spirit could have ministered to wisdom in that way. Nevertheless, in the minds of our health professionals, wine is simply another vehicle for conveying alcohol into the bloodstream, and they are either uninterested in or unable to appreciate its distinctiveness.

Scruton, however, is eloquent on why wine drinking is different from, say, drinking cider, and this book is studded with faintly romanticised, but also thought-provoking, evocations of its special intellectual benefits. For instance, it would be easy to respond to prose such as this with a vulgar scoff (p. 115):

Wine, properly drunk, transfigures the world at which you look, illuminating that which is precisely most mysterious in the contingent beings surrounding you, which is the fact that they are - and also that they might not have been. The contingency of each thing glows in its aspect, and for a moment you are aware that individuality and identity are the outward forms taken by a single inner fire, and that this fire is also you.

A good recommendation, too, is Scruton's advice to look for examples of a white Pernand-Vergelesses from the lieu-dit "Les Noirets", which lies at the foot of the hill of Corton and is thus the neighbour of the fabulous white burgundy grown there, Corton-Charlemagne. According to Scruton, Pernand-Vergelesses "Les Noirets" possesses (p. 37)

the fine clean aromas and deep nutty richness that are the hallmarks of a noble white Burgundy.

Lastly, if the economic crisis has driven Yquem, Climens and Rieussec from your cellar, you could do much worse than follow Scruton's advice and replace it with a good Monbazillac, Château Septy. It is nothing like as subtle a drink as good Sauternes or Barsac. But it is properly sweet (or, as Scruton has it, it possesses "all the E major sonority of a golden Sauternes"); and it has none of that harsh afterburn you sometimes get with Monbazillac.

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 bedrooms are all the same, give or take a few square feet, down to the kind of pictures on the wall, which must soothe without stimulating in any way. They are there only because an absence of pictures would disturb the guest.

The windows overlook the car-parks that are half the raison d'etre of the hotel: not that anyone is expected to look out of them. They scarcely open, at most by an inch or two, these windows, both to prevent suicides and to keep the silence in and the temperature-controlled air undisturbed. Although giant aircraft take ff only a few hundred yards away at most, their sound is reduced to a dull hum, which, when it occurs often and regularly, is rather soothing, like the ticking of a clock.

The strange thing is that I loved my three nights in these utterly impersonal surroundings. What happy hours I spent stretched out on my bed reading detective novels (I had taken the wise precaution of bringing several old-fashioned green and white-covered Penguins with me). I had no computer with me and switched off my mobile phone. I was almost as incommunicado as it is possible to be in the modern world: and this in the middle of an airport through which scores of millions of people pass annually!

I began after a while to reflect on why I was enjoying myself so much. Clearly it had something to do with the anonymity of the place, and a release from the need to be somebody or play a part in front of others. There was no social pressure whatsoever; there was no need to pretend or to try to please. Airport hotels, then, are the realm of Pure Being. They are places of spiritual refreshment or even of retreat. They are, at least potentially, the monasteries of our time.

Are there not commercial possibilities here? Re-think the meaning of your existence with three days in a Heathrow hotel! Guaranteed nothing to do, no one to meet, perfect calm, food bland enough to reduce eating to a physiological function. No one can spend his time fruitlessly wondering what is for dinner tonight: since no one, in the normal way, is expected to stay more than one night, why should the menu ever vary? The food today will be the same as the food in ten years' time - though it is possible that it will be called something different.

Needless to say, only those with minds - or perhaps I should say souls - prepared will be able to benefit from spiritual retreats in airport hotels: by which I mean those strong enough of will not to turn on the television that, appropriately enough, is kept in the modern equivalent of the commode, the television cabinet. How easily the heavenly peace of the room can be turned into one of the circles of hell: at the flick of a switch, in fact. To put people out of the way of temptation, perhaps the television could be removed for the duration of their stay; though more advanced souls could have them in their rooms, much as the Mahatma slept with young girls to test his chastity

Except for very superior people, of whom I am not one, such stays in airport hotels would be short, a few days at most; but the most spiritually-inclined, no doubt, would eventually come to live in them. My Diogenes Travel Agency would offer discounts, or perhaps even time shares, for regular subscribers.

The desire to get away from the oppressive aspects of reality is natural enough. That is why I sympathise so much with people who work in National Health Service organisations such as Trust Headquarters. Their offices have much in common with airport hotels except, of course, that the receptionists - who are reached only through a decontaminating air-lock at the entrance of the building - tend to the opposite of airport hotel receptionists. They react with Pavlovian suspicion towards all strangers, and perhaps receive an electric shock through the floor if their fail to display it adequately.

As in airport hotels, the flow of air in the premises is perfectly controlled and the windows do not open (there is no need for them to be able to do so). The outside world enters only as a faint and soothing hum, as a vague rumour of its existence. Here in the Platonic realm of targets, reality is as welcome as salmonella in a cream tea.

This is the dialectic, then, of the modern world: between the frightening disorder of pullulation on the one hand, and the antiseptic order of the airport hotel on the other.

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This is a very German outcome. The decisive voice in the appointment was that of the Chancellor, Angela Merkel. Her opposition to Mr Blair served to swing the French President, Mr Sarkozy, away from Tony Blair when his candidature was beginning to seem unstoppable. The appointment of Mr van Rompuy also epitomises a huge and underappreciated shift in German attitudes towards the European project and their conception of security. Since the creation of the Federal Republic in 1949, Bonn and then Berlin had sought to embed German security in an irreversible process of European political integration on the one side, and the maintenance and later expansion of NATO on the other.

All that changed with the inclusion of Poland in both organisations. With a substantial buffer to the east, Germany reckons itself much less in need of the American security umbrella and the support of allies. In short, far from demanding a world role since the fall of the wall as many had feared - the Federal Republic has retreated into a geopolitical cocoon. She is so swaddled by friendly neighbours that future conflicts appear to be matters of choice, not desperate struggles for survival.

None of this would matter, if the Germans were right. In fact, the challenges facing them and the European Union more generally are more grave than ever before. To the east, Russian assertiveness is creating an arc of instability from the Baltic to the Black Sea. In Afghanistan, the "war on terror" is in deep trouble; Iran continues to press ahead with its nuclear programme. It is a commonplace that Chinese power is rising.

Within many areas of the Union itself, the threat of Islamist terrorism has escalated over the past decade. And - let us make no mistake about it - the new wind blowing from Washington is far colder than we realise. Mr Obama has little interest in us and one need only look at his abandonment of the missile shield in Poland and the Czech Republic to see how quickly our security will be sacrificed if it suits their purposes. We are now increasingly on our own.

There is very little that can be done about this in the short term. The full significance of the global American retreat will need to sink in first. Then we will have to stand by to repel the resurgence of anti-western forces throughout the world. Nobody can know for certain when that challenge will come, and exactly how it will manifest itself. One thing, however, is clear. The longer the leadership of the free world remains in the hands of Barack Obama, Gordon Brown, Nicolas Sarkozy, Angela Merkel and - let us not us forget - Mr van Rompuy, the shorter we will have to wait.

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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Here is the latest, offering courses on the following:
Building Multi Professional Teams
Communications Skills
Assertiveness Training
Emotional Intelligence
Negotiation and Influencing Skills
Implementing Change
Time Management
Dealing with Conflict

Each of these course comes with a testimonial even less trustworthy than those that used to accompany advertisements for Pink Pills for Pale People, in so far as not even initials or addresses to within the nearest hemisphere are offered.

Really enjoyed every minute of it! Flexible, memorable approach, encouraging direction. Good practical exercises. Thank you!

Excellent session - very interactive.

Very useful and helpful, it helped me reflect on my work style and identify important issues.

The fee for each course (no doubt repayable by the National Health Service to those who work for it) is £225 per person, with a discount of 10 per cent for those who - perish the thought! - sign up for four or more of them.

If instead of going to a course you arrange for a course to come to you - an advantage to the public purse, because it will entail "no extra travel and overnight accommodation costs" - it will cost only £3000, which means that (shall we say) eight people would have to attend for their to be an overall saving. And just think how wonderful everything will be when all are equally assertive!

Another discount is available for individuals, of 50 per cent this time - for those who are retired.

It used to be that the British had a sense of humour, an irony that was an admirable approach to life, and that was once supposed to have preserved them from the wilder shores of ideology, whether communist or fascist. The idea that professional people aged more than 60 should now attend a course on how to assert themselves or learn to communicate would have produced a guffaw of contemptuous laughter. No longer, it seems.

All this para-work, this ceaseless diversionary activity, is designed, or at least destined, to prevent people from carrying on their real work. By doing so, of course, it creates employment, or at least the necessity to pay people salaries: for, overall, many man-days are lost to it. And it creates pseudo-entrepreneurial opportunities for so-called consultants (often ex-employees of the organisations whose staff they now offer to train in such skills as assertiveness). It is, in effect, an exercise in Keynesian demand-management, but unlike the kind of public works that Keynes envisaged as a stimulus to a flagging economy, it leaves the country with nothing of enduring value, unless a bureaucrat with a flat-screened television and a new conservatory be called something of enduring value.

Needless to add, ceaseless "personal and professional development" is perfectly compatible with the most abysmal incompetence. Indeed, such incompetence is welcome, for it creates ever more demand for the personal and professional development that is supposedly the means to overcome it. This is what I believe is known as a positive feedback loop.

I will mention just one of the courses on offer, the "building" of multi-disciplinary teams, so called. I have some experience of multi-disciplinary teams once they have been "built", or should I say "assembled", "agglomerated" or "accumulated". More often than not, in my experience, they are not so much multi-disciplinary as undisciplined. Lacking a clear structure of overall authority, and therefore of responsibility, they lead to endless disputes as to who is to do what, as well as the grossest neglect of the ostensible aims of the "team".

The power struggles are interminable and insoluble, for no one is truly in charge and any instructions are regarded as an infringement of or attack upon the idea of equality of disciplines and equality within disciplines. The pretence that the most junior is equal to the most senior means that supervision scarcely happens, or only retrospectively, after a disaster, when the most junior person who can plausibly be blamed is singled out.

The inevitable squabbles that result lead to accusations of bullying, usually defined in purely subjective terms: you are bullied if you feel you are (in the absence of a requirement of objective correlates of feeling, thought is, of course, quite unnecessary and probably best avoided). Such accusations can result in a Kafka-esque procedure lasting months and occupying days, weeks and months of labour-time.

Meanwhile, neglect of the real work is ascribed to a shortage of "resources" and the object of the team's attentions, that is to say members of the public, are offered perfunctory services, for example never seeing the same member of the team twice. Between holidays, team meetings and courses on how to make the team function better, there is no time left for the elementary compassion of consistency.

Every public enquiry into every disaster that comes within the remit of the services set up to ameliorate the social pathology brought about by years of social engineering finds the same thing: lack of communication between the various parts of the multi-disciplinary teams. Time, surely, for a course on Communication Skills.

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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I simply do not believe that she found the letter difficult to read: or if she did, it says more about her reading ability than about Mr Brown's intentions. I read the letter without difficulty in facsimile form in a newspaper, which is unlikely to have improved its clarity, as I am sure did millions of others. Moreover, I could not find the twenty-five spelling mistakes that she claimed to find in it, unless one counts the slight ambivalence sometimes created by the Prime Minister's inelegant hand. I am afraid that Mrs Janes, worthy of sympathy as a grieving mother as she is, was not telling the truth.

Of course, Mr Brown could not say this because we live in a world of immaculate victimhood. He who exposes the mistakes or lies of a victim is now a barefaced villain. A spokesman for the Prime Minister is reported as having said of his subsequent telephone conversation with Mrs Janes that "He apologised for the letter and the way that she feels about the letter".

This is a weaselly way of putting things, but typical of our times, and now de rigueur. There is no reason why the Prime Minister should have apologised to Mrs Janes for the way she felt about the letter, unless the way she felt about the letter was reasonable - which it was not.

Then he might have apologised for having caused her distress, rather than for the distress that she felt (a subtle but important distinction).

In short, he had no reason, other than that of political expedience, to apologise to her. If anything, the apologies were due the other way round, from Mrs Janes to Mr Brown: first for having publicised a private letter, and second for having allowed or encouraged the dissemination of a private telephone conversation. We cannot complain of the intrusiveness of government and officialdom if we do not ourselves respect the very idea of privacy.

The weasel-words of the Prime Minister's spokesman are a symptom of the horrible elevation of emotion over thought in our culture. "I feel, therefore I'm justified," seems to be our neo-Cartesian credo. When, for example, someone complains unreasonably about something done in the National Health Service (and, God knows, there are enough grounds for reasonable complaint), one is supposed to be as apologetic as if there were something really to apologise for. Thus all apologies are created equal, and none is sincere.

I thought this disgusting, and the only time someone complained about me, to the effect that I had not been helpful in giving him a sick note, I replied, in writing, "Mr C…. is a drunk who beats his wife, and I'm not signing any sick certificate for him". I am glad to say that I heard no more from Mr C…., for what I said was true.

The points Mrs Janes made about the state of equipment of the British army are another matter. She was saying in forceful terms what many others have said, including American officers. But it seems to me that she could have brought these matters up in a different way, at a different time, and more forcefully because less obviously the consequence of immediate grief.

What she evidently did not consider was the overall effect or impression that she was creating. Let us leave aside the vexed question of whether British forces should be in Afghanistan at all, or that of what they are trying to do there: Mrs Janes herself believes that they should be there. And even those opposed to the whole business can hardly want the Taliban to win.

Did Mrs Janes not consider, therefore, that Taliban morale might be immeasurably improved by a row such as the one she has stirred up? What will the tribesmen think of an enemy that turns a single death into a public display of competing emotion? Will they not be encouraged to think that, if only they can bring about a few more such deaths, they will win? A military enemy that considers a few losses intolerable is, after all, not a very formidable one.

The mere fact, now known to the whole world in a way that it was not before, that the Prime Minister writes personally to the relatives of soldiers killed in action will encourage the Taliban greatly. An enemy so solicitous of the life each individual (a quality admirable in its own eyes) will surely be seen by Taliban as weak and vacillating, one that cannot stay the course.

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 Europeans, far from queuing up to provide more troops, are eyeing the exits. And who can blame them, when Mr Obama himself has sounded such an uncertain trumpet. True, he authorised a substantial force increase at the beginning of the year, but he sat on the recommendations of his commander General McChrystal for more than two months. The interminable seminar on "options" for Afghanistan has demoralised the coalition effort on the ground, and created the impression of unsteady military leadership. It is widely decried by British and other European strategists as the reason why they are unable to commit more troops themselves.

The events of the past weeks, when promised paltry force increases were so hedged about with qualifications, and demand for matching deployments, as to make them meaningless, have confirmed this picture. Worse still is the political vacuum. Mr Holbrooke has become increasingly invisible. The Afghan President Hamid Karzai has successfully seen him off on more than one occasion, and most recently over the flagrantly rigged election.

All this, unfortunately, is of a piece with Mr Obama's foreign policy across the board. He bowed to Russians objections to the proposed missile shield in Poland and the Czech Republic - thus deeply embarrassing two loyal European allies - but failed to secure Moscow's support over Iran in return. He has indulged the Chinese government, first by sending Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to Beijing with the explicit promise to relax criticisms of the regime's human rights record, and then by refusing to see the Dalai Lama. He deeply disappointed Iranian Democrats by his weak criticism of the stolen election in their country, and yet the mullahs have thrown his offer of a fresh start back in his faces, not least by their increasing belligerence over the nuclear issue. Israel, which needs to be persuaded to stop building settlements for its own good, has more or less told him to get stuffed, and he has meekly accepted this. Finally, Obama has shown virtually no interest in Africa in general, and in Darfur in particular.

In part, this restraint can be excused by the fact that the United States is militarily over-stretched and in serious economic distress. That does not explain, however, why the President does not even do what he promised to do: to draw down in Iraq and to use the spare fiscal and troop capacity to step up operations in Afghanistan.

Hillary Clinton said that while American leadership had been "wanting" during the Bush years, it was still "wanted" by the world. The President seems to be much less sure of this, talking a low profile whenever anything of substance is on the agenda. Obama's hesitancy clearly stems much more from a fundamental unease with the concept of intervention and democracy export itself. One way or the other, the President obviously does not believe that those who refused to be persuaded may ultimately have to be compelled.

"Yes, we can", Obama famously promised last year. Reviewing the record, it seems clear that he can't - or, worse, - that he simply won't.

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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Most have come to terms with their lot, but the French Queen Marie Antoinette (the best performance of the evening, by Maria Kanyova), guillotined in October 1793 has been unable to find peace. Her restless spirit haunts the opening scenes. Her admirer Beaumarchais proposes to rewrite the course of history with a new drama, partly to win Marie Antoinette's love, but perhaps partly also to atone for his own role in the intellectual origins of the Revolution. Henceforth, the action takes place at two levels: the "present", which is indicated by the brilliant ghostly white, grey and chalked faces of the performers, and the new "past", which unfolds as a play performed in "normal colours".

Musically, this relationship is expressed by a highly playful and allusive score. There is plenty of Mozart, of course, not least because his Marriage of Figaro is based on a play by Beaumarchais, but also in the "oriental" scenes which are reminiscent of his Die Entfuehrung aus dem Serail. There were echoes of West Side Story in the movements which combined jazz and classical themes. I even thought I heard some Queen lurking in there. I didn't spot any Wagner, but that may be because one of the characters remarks in a knowing aside, that serious opera is supposed to be like Wagner.

The overall effect is eclectic, playful, generally melodious, accessible and highly parodic. For example, in a moment intended to mimic the dramatic return of the Commendatore in Don Giovanni, the servant "Figaro" is told to prepare to meet his "maker" - the playwright Beaumarchais! In this riotous feast of musical in-jokes - skilfully pitched at a middle-brow audience - all sense of the past and present inevitably breaks down. The sense of dislocation is heightened by use of background film scenes from a 1920s drama on the French Revolution to provide a sense of the crowd in action.

The "alternative" French Revolution of Beaumarchais's play pivots on the fate of a necklace. Corigliano's choice of that particular form of jewellery can hardly be a coincidence. It was after all, the notorious "affair of the diamond necklace" in the 1780s - when a courtier attempted to curry favour with the queen with an expensive gift - which so damaged Marie Antoinette's public standing and led inexorably to her trial and execution. Beaumarchais's plot, which hinges on the sale of a necklace by the Spanish ambassador Almaviva in order to pay for the queen's escape, is thus an attempt to rewrite history at several levels.

This turns out to be far more difficult than Beaumarchais expects. His characters demonstrate a worrying tendency to emancipate themselves from authorial control. Almaviva's servant Figaro - knowing that his master's false friend Begearss plans to betray them to the authorities, runs off with the necklace. At first, however, he refuses to return it on the grounds that Marie Antoinette is everything that the revolutionaries make her out to be: selfish, frivolous and spendthrift to boot.

But even when the playwright restores his narrative, the necklace is returned and can be sold to aid the queen's flight, history refuses to change. "Now you can live", Beaumarchais tells Marie Antoinette. "No, Beaumarchais", she replies in a beautiful and memorable moment. She refuses to be saved, because observing the play she has gained an understanding of why she was hated; before, "I didn't know the world outside". She accepts her fate, and can now rest.

Perhaps this is just as well, because we cannot know history would have turned out without the French Revolution and with Maria Antonette. In the Final Countdown, the question of alternative outcomes is neatly sidestepped. A storm intervenes to bring the protagonists back to the present before the captain of the aircraft carrier can launch a devastating strike on the Japanese fleet nearing Pearl Harbour. In Making History, on the other hand, the hero succeeds in preventing Hitler's birth but is stunned to find that an even more malevolent, and much more competent German dictator arises in his place, wins the Second World and creates an enduring racist dystopia.

Alternative histories thus fulfil a useful intellectual function. They make us aware of the determinist trap of assuming that what actually happened was the only - or the best or the worst - possible outcome. The best of these exercises - including The Ghosts of Versailles - also demonstrate the power of artistic recreation to provide insight into the fractured relationship between the present and a past that refuses to go away until laid to rest by art.

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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Presumably this was because Gately was homosexual and those who complained felt that the article was derogatory - by implication, nothing was said directly - of homosexuals. In fact, had Gately not been homosexual, and had it been his wife who was not present at his death, the columnist for the Daily Mail might have written precisely the same words; but let that pass. By no stretch of the imagination could it be said that the article was an incitement to an illegal act, at least in the traditional sense.

It seems that the police are now to be resorted to, at least by some of us, when we have our feelings offended. In the conception of the complainers, presumably, the article was an expression of contempt and therefore of incitement to contempt. And since we all have an inalienable right to the equal regard of everyone, the article was, or should have been, against the law.

I have no idea how seriously the police took the complaints. Alas, I have no confidence that they dismissed them out of hand. The capacity of British public servants, in the atmosphere of political correctness in which they now have to work, to get everything exactly the wrong way round, doing what they ought not to do, and not doing what the ought, is very great. Chief constables are now less policemen than managers of public opinion whose job is the placation of vocal pressure groups. Let mayhem reign, so long as pressure groups are satisfied.

But even if the police took no notice of the complaints, it is not necessarily true that the complaints will have had no effect. The fact that they were made at all, that everyone now knows that they were made, and that we cannot rely on the police to dismiss them out of hand as neurotic if not actually psychotic, is sufficient to induce people, who want no trouble with the police, to start watching their ps and qs. Freedom of expression is thus nibbled away, not by censorship, but by self-censorship. We begin to live in an atmosphere of fear, in which walls have ears.

This atmosphere is already very strong in much of the public service. No one wants to be caught saying anything that might offend anyone, and that might lead to a formal complaint. After all, the definition of offences such as bullying are often so broad and loosely defined that, once the charge is brought, it is nearly impossible to defend yourself against it. You enter a Kafka-esque world in which refutation is impossible. It is best, therefore, to be utterly bland and never speak your mind.

Exquisite sensitivity is, of course, very useful to managers, who exert their power by exhaustive and exhausting investigation of the ill-defined and undisprovable. Immense labour goes into the attempted capture of clouds; and once someone has experienced an investigation into such a complaint against him, lasting weeks or months, he is changed for life.

To go running off to teacher if our feelings are offended, even if the person who offended them is indeed offensive and fully intended to be offensive, is to increase the power of teacher over us. It is to demand that teacher regulate our speech in minute particulars; and once the grosser violations of our feelings are suppressed, we will become yet more sensitive, so that what were once minor violations of our feelings become gross in our own estimate, until we extinguish our own altogether.

The more benefits the authorities claim to confer upon us, the greater the scope for informing. Recently in my local council offices I saw a poster asking the public to inform upon those who were cheating on Social Security (the picture of such a cheat was of an obese young woman, junk food made flesh). When I told the staff that I found the poster creepy, they were surprised and did not know what I meant. Was I in favour of benefit fraud? Of course not, I said; but even less was I in favour of a population of informers. And that is precisely what a benevolently overweening state will produce.

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 answer, of course, is that they had paid so much for their ticket to watch the match. I am told by someone who knows, as I do not, that the average price of admission to a match of one of the best teams can be as much as £50. This is a lot of money, slightly more than £60 before basic rate income tax (to say nothing of National Insurance), especially for the kind of person to whom football is very important.

It is clear, then, that if we are to get to the root of the problem of riots at football matches, and thereby to eradicate them, we must reduce the price of football tickets so that the fans are not reduced either to hunger or to penury (or to both) by attending matches.

Repression is quite useless, at best a sticking plaster over a gaping wound. Better or more policing will never have any effect on rioting considered as a social phenomenon, and viewed in the only correct way, that is to say statistically.

How are we to reduce the price of tickets? Clearly it would be counterproductive to take economy measures such as reducing the pay of footballers, for then they would simply go elsewhere. This is even more certain because most of our best players are foreigners anyway, and cannot be assumed to play for clubs like Liverpool because of the attractiveness of the local life-style. They would up boots and depart, and Britain badly needs their talent, our own players being too inclined to drink and brawl in nightclubs to maintain a very high standard.

No, the obvious solution is for the government to subsidise tickets, a la Covent Garden. Let ordinary people pay what they can afford - say five pounds - that will allow them to fill themselves up with hot dogs, hamburgers and tomato ketchup without financial strain. Then there will be no looting of refreshment stands, either for food or for money.

I hear some heartless people say that this is nonsense, that if people can afford to go to a football match at the price they pay for the ticket, they don't need subsidies that will allow them to buy fast food as well. They can afford it without subsidy. In any case, football is a luxury and not a necessity: if they cannot afford both football matches and food, they should go without the former.

But would it not be unjust to condemn people to a lack of entertainment just because they lacked the financial wherewithal to obtain it? It is not true that such entertainment is a luxury: it is as basic a human necessity as, say, food and health care. This is demonstrated by the fact that no society ever examined by social anthropologists, however poor or primitive it might be, has been without its means of entertainment. And if entertainment is a fundamental human need, it must also be a fundamental human right. We all have a right to be entertained.

Hence subsidising tickets to football matches is no different in principle from (say) subsiding bread in Egypt. Such subsidies ensure that everyone gets at least a minimum of what he requires. Subsidies are social justice.

Subsidies of football tickets would ensure that those even poorer and more desperate than the rioters at Barnsley could attend matches: it would democratise football and bring it to people who would otherwise be excluded, at least from seeing it live. The high price of tickets is a manifestation of that terrible, if relatively recently-discovered phenomenon, social exclusion. There could be no better way of excluding exclusion than by making football tickets cheap.

Furthermore, it is very likely that many of the people who do in fact pay £50 for tickets, even those who do not riot, cannot really afford to do so. Rather than riot, they – and no doubt their families – suffer in silence. If they pay £50 for a ticket, that means they have £50 less to spend on something else, fresh fruit and vegetables for example, or other morally desirable goods. It is even possible that some are forced by the high price of tickets to deny their children the latest trainers that they need, thus driving them - their children - into crime from sheer desperation. All this suffering could be avoided if only the price of tickets to football matches were lowered.

Let us have done, then, with the futile expedient of repression at football matches, which take up so much police time. It is time to get to the root of the problem, which is the unjust nature of our society. By making attendance at football matches so much more difficult, from the financial point of view, for some rather than for others, this unjust nature is making riots such as those at Barnsley inevitable. It is time for a hypothecated tax on the prosperous to subsidise tickets to football matches.

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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Mervyn King and Lord Turner, chairman of the Financial Services Authority, have different styles and approaches, but both seem to believe there needs to be a distinction between casino and utility banking operations. Professor King seems to be arguing that a safety wall between the two can be manufactured by regulators whilst the FSA's new discussion paper seems to argue that the regulator can achieve a virtual barrier by imposing different capital requirements on banks according to their riskiness.

We think Prof King's position resonates with ours more than Lord Turner's because the governor insists that,

The belief that appropriate regulation can ensure that speculative activities do not result in failures is a delusion.

We think things can be simplified further. The obvious dilemma is that tax-payers and consumers need to know that while the state will in the final analysis stand by the financial sector, politicians are doing nothing that makes that emergency action more likely.

The only alternative to the moral hazard of cosseting and corseting the sector is to allow competition to encourage the vigour of greed and chill of fear to stalk the market.

As a precursor, it is necessary for governments to break up firms which are too big to fail and too big to regulate. That would have the merit of being in line with the fundamental, deep and old understanding that capitalism's biggest hazard is oligopoly. Let's redeploy Adam Smith before we redeploy John Maynard Keynes. Anti-trust and competition commissions need to be at the heart of reform, not just the Bank of England, the FSA or EU financial regulators.

The consequence of increased competition is that regulators could relax their direct control whilst intensifying their interrogation, challenge and exposure of firms’ risk-taking. Regulators should outlaw only the most egregious behaviour, but they could play a role in flagging up and publicising sub-optimal habits. It is easy for firms to game the absolutism of legalistic rules, and much more purifying for them to need to prove their professionalism.

More widely, government should claim that their most important role is simply to ensure that everyone insists that firms demonstrate that they are optimally safe players. Some firms will and should opt for safety-first strategies, others for more adventurous ones. They will all face scrutiny and evaluation by their own peers, savers, investors, managers, shareholders, academics, credit agencies, journalists - and regulators - all of whom will become more anxious and more active sources of discipline in the market.

Cock-ups would still happen and might happen more often. But they would have much less chance of causing contagion or a massacre of the innocents.

Michael Mainelli is co-author with Bob Giffords of The Road to Long Finance, 2009, published by the Centre for Study of Financial Innovation.

Richard D. North is the author of Mr Cameron's Makeover Politics, 2009, published by the Social Affairs Unit.

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Ivan Lewis, the Foreign Office minister with responsibility for Libya, seems to have set out the framework for such a "deal" in a leaked letter of 3 August 2009, and Oliver Miles, the former British ambassador to Libya refers to "some kind of a deal".

But what if Mr Brown had believed the British national interest to be opposed to the release? Prior to devolution, the decision would have fallen to the British Home Secretary in London (or today to the British Justice Secretary), both Westminster appointees in any case. Today, the decision is taken by the Scottish Justice Secretary, which is why the hapless Kenny MacAskill found himself in the international limelight. Mr Brown can indicate his views, and they may be listened to, but he actually has no way of enforcing his will.

In other words, it is now perfectly possible for Edinburgh to take decisions with powerful and possible deleterious foreign policy implications for Great Britain. There is effectively a Scottish foreign policy, as the profusion of Saltires at Megrahi's Libyan homecoming attests.

Leaving aside the merits of the Megrahi case, this development heralds two potential dangers for London. First, there is the problem of mixed messages. Anybody who knows the British constitution will be aware that certain decisions are supposed to be for Edinburgh, and not Westminster, but this may not be clear to others.

It certainly was not so to the Libyans, who made the linkage very specific in the negotiations. "You were on the table at every stage", Ghaddafi's son Saif famously stated. It was not clear to the Americans either. Popular opinion in the United States was outraged, with loose talk of a boycott, as well as stiff letter from FBI director Robert Mueller to Mr MacAskill accusing him of "giv[ing] comfort to terrorists around the world".

The ire was not just directed at Edinburgh: the former Foreign Office minister Mark Malloch Brown has just attributed some of the awkwardness between Mr Brown and the President to the Lockerbie controversy. Nor - perhaps surprisingly - was it obvious to British business and retired diplomats such as Oliver Miles. One is reminded of the confusion surrounding the relationship between Britain and Hanover in eighteenth century European diplomacy.

Secondly, the Lockerbie release highlights the general lack of policy coherence between Edinburgh and London on matters of grave national security. Scottish domestic policy and British foreign policy are once more out of synch. What if, for example, the Edinburgh executive, buoyed by anti-American public opinion, should signal its intention to bail out of the "War on Terror" and seek to buy immunity from terrorist attack by setting free Islamist prisoners in Scottish jails? The same problem, incidentally could arise in Northern Ireland if and when judicial matters are devolved to the Stormont Assembly, where a Sinn Fein executive might well take a more relaxed view of the al-Qaeda prisoners inmates in Ulster prisons than either London or Washington.

Perhaps all this was not foreseeable in the halcyon post-war days of the late 1990s, when devolution was the slogan of the day in Scotland and Northern Ireland. It is certainly not clear what the answer should be. One possibility would be to create a new category of "federal" crime for terrorist offences, which would be dealt with by courts within the jurisdiction of London. That is how the problem is dealt with in the US where the right of individual states is not permitted to interfere with the security of the Union as a whole. Or perhaps Scotsmen will come to accept that, just as their original constitutionalties were largely the product of external pressures, the security challenges of the twenty-fist century might be an argument for more unity, if not actual union.

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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Reviews of The Storm of War have been overwhelmingly fulsome - as they should be - with one striking exception, a now rather notorious review by Professor Richard Evans in the Times Literary Supplement (21-28 August 2009), where Roberts is accused of every conceivable wrongdoing from "approach[ing] his topic in a kind of Boy's Own spirit" to glorifying the British Empire to ignoring important sources and relying on book reviews (that's right) for many of his sources. This review is in my opinion perverse and inappropriate, as well as patronising - Roberts is advised to stop writing histories and concentrate on biographies of Tory politicians.

In The Storm of War, however, Roberts is not writing a scholarly history but a "trade history" work intended for the intelligent lay reader. And, after all, it is the Second World War that Roberts is writing about, not the War of the Spanish Succession. It is surely impossible to write about the Second World War without making moral judgments about good and evil, since Hitler made it into a war between good and evil. That Churchill (above all), Roosevelt, and their key military leaders emerge as heroes is inevitable, since they were responsible for defeating Hitler and his allies.

As to Roberts' use of sources, Evans's copy of his book must be different from mine, which has thirty-eight pages of footnotes and twenty-seven pages of bibliography, including thirty-seven archives of private, unpublished papers which he consulted. I think that I am pretty familiar with the literature of this field, and yet I learned something new on virtually every page.

To be sure, there are aspects of this topic to which I would have devoted more space. To cite two of these, after the attack by Nazi Germany, Stalin gave Lazar Kaganovitch, one of the more dreadful senior commissars, the task of putting as many Soviet factories in the western part of the USSR as he could on boxcars and transporting them to the Urals, to be re-erected there as armaments factories. This he did successfully and, it must be said, amazingly, organising the seemingly imposible task of sending whole factories a thousand miles to the east, in the chaotic conditions of the time, and reassembling them for the war effort. This astonishing feat has never received the attention it deserves from historians, including Roberts.

Roberts also notes the Soviet invasion of Manchuria in early August 1945 in only one line, and most Western historians have assumed that this was a nominal attempt by Stalin to take credit for defeating Japan. In fact, as Geoffrey Roberts (presumably no relation) shows in his outstanding Stalin's Wars (pp. 285-295, Yale University Press, 2006), it was a vast, full-scale invasion, involving 1.5 million Soviet troops, with 5500 tanks and 3900 aircraft. Geoffrey Roberts states (p. 298) that

the Manchurian campaign in many ways represented the peak of Soviet operational art during the Second World War,

William D. Rubinstein is professor of history at the University of Aberystwyth.