04 December 1998

The nanny state is far from dead: league tables of school results, of the sort published this week; curfews on unruly children; campaigns to stop people smoking; counsellors for prospective ... read more

Wednesday The day starts with a row. Cheryl decides that a minor domestic failure on my part (I forgot to do the twins' homework with them yesterday when she was ... read more

Bon appetit Desperate Dan and other T-bone aficionados can start salivating. Nick Brown, the Minister of Agriculture, announced his intention to lift the ban on beef, probably in time for ... read more

There is no question which side is setting the pace in our parochial debate about the euro. The Eurosceptics may lack charismatic figureheads to lead them all the way into ... read more

To Adelaide Street for the unveiling of the statue of Oscar Wilde, on the 98th anniversary of his death. It is a very British affair with a melange of the ... read more

This week the British government made it crystal clear that it does not believe that its fraternal parties on the Continent have understood that socialism is dead. It was made ... read more

I'm the heart of a hen in the breast of a duck,

A calf-liver stuck in a sheep,

The brain of a pea in the shell of a bean,

A ... read more

Class boundaries have been redrawn. Up the social order go teachers, librarians and bank managers, now elevated to Professional Grade One. Down go cooks, hairdressers and plasterers. Technically, this leaves ... read more

A few years ago, Nick Ross, the veteran presenter of Crimewatch, told us that "we are barking mad about crime in this country. We have an obsession with believing the ... read more

What has our favourite feminist mouthed off about now? She revealed this week that she worked for MI6's "Information Research Department" in 1952, writing anti-Polish propaganda for the media. She ... read more

Some years ago university lecturers noticed that their pay had been overtaken by that of some college teachers. Horrified, they marched down Whitehall to lobby their MPs, carrying banners which ... read more

As I write, it is almost 27 years to the day that I and eight others walked out of the Old Bailey, freed by a jury on charges of riot, ... read more

The most remarkable aspect of the Pinochet judgment was the media's failure to grasp what it means - and what it does not mean. Their errors seriously misled the public ... read more

The Dead Citizens' Charter (National Funerals College publication, £5 from the NFC, 3 Priory Road, Bristol BS8 1TX, tel: 0117 928 9024). Death may be the last taboo, but this ... read more

My brother, 35, still lives with his mum. Two years ago, when our mother moved to London, it seemed only natural that my high-earning, single brother should invite her to ... read more

Visitors to that hub of our parliamentary democracy, the central lobby of the Palace of Westminster, can see at once that they are in the presence of two essential pillars ... read more

Christmas hasn't just come early for the ITV companies - it's come twice. It first arrived when the Independent Television Commission (ITC), despite a consultation exercise which showed public opinion ... read more

They thought they had got over the worst once they had struggled through their eight-minute presentations on "Can there be a Third Way in foreign policy?" But there was one ... read more

In his homosexual novel Maurice, E M Forster has a doctor advise the tortured hero to move to France. "The English," the doctor observes, "are disinclined to accept human nature." ... read more

When Tony Blair was asked recently to name his favourite book, he said The Lord of the Rings. Pausing only to stifle a low groan, and to recall the late ... read more

What is it that prevents India being successful and stops it pulling its vast population of almost one billion out of the rut of widespread poverty, illiteracy and general non-achievement? ... read more

Not so long ago I found myself in a curiously heated exchange with an American academic. We had just listened to his wife, who was head of one of the ... read more

The prince sympathised with young black soldiers at the Army Training Regiment in Pirbright, Surrey.

Donovan Mowatt, 19, recruited in the army's recent drive to attract soldiers from ethnic ... read more

Has anybody famous come out of the "Fame School of Performing Arts" that Paul McCartney helped set up in Liverpool four years ago? And what about that football academy that ... read more

The government's £75 "pension guarantee", which Frank Field rightly criticises as a disincentive to savings, is neither a pension nor a guarantee ("A hand-up or a put-down for the poor?", ... read more

I always suspected that Andrew Marr ("Stuff the hope and glory", 27 November) had gone to the wrong school and his confession that he was taught a sort of little ... read more

G K Chesterton is often said to have said that when people stop believing in God they don't believe in nothing but in everything or anything - an attribution repeated ... read more

I was surprised to read in David Halpern's article ("Hard times for the lucky and the lazy", 20 November) that the enemies of new Labour are no longer clearly class ... read more

John Lloyd is wrong: there is nothing "right-wing" about support for marriage ("How the left hijacked the family", 27 November). Indeed, traditional family life was the bedrock of ethical socialism. ... read more

Chris Powell is absolutely right to argue that Britain must promote itself more vigorously through its innovative products and services. He is wrong, however, to suggest that this is not ... read more

It is just as dogmatic of Anna Freeman to assert that God is not as for the Pope to assert that God is (Letters, 27 November). Isn't an open-minded agnosticism ... read more

We'd be lost without them. We see dozens, perhaps hundreds of arrows in a day, on roads and in air-ports, on keyboards and web sites. We dare not disobey them, ... read more

Anyone wandering over the Embankment Bridge on Wednesday night last week would have been confronted by a tide of Iranians, mostly of a certain age, heading to the South Bank ... read more

Paul Newman is no longer the face on the sauce bottle. As weather-beaten private investigator Harry Ross, his expression is tight, military, unamused, the voice bruised and grainy. Robert Benton's ... read more

The third episode of ITV's comedy drama Cold Feet (Sunday, 9.30pm) opened with Karen Marsden (Hermione Norris) wallowing in a warm bath and ended, post-coitally, with her splashing her face ... read more

The Barbican Centre's festival of "American Pioneers" ended with the music of three composers, two of whom are indubitably American and indubitably pioneers, but one who has often seemed barely ... read more

Rock likes to think it overturned everything that came before it, but rock package concerts - which have been with us since the birth of the music in Britain - ... read more

As a child I would sometimes gaze at a particularly weighty dictionary or encyclopaedia and wonder at how anyone could have put together such a monument. Those were the days ... read more

In the desolate wastes of north Essex we have to make our own entertainment, but I don't think that completely explains why I have been brooding on the death of ... read more

Regular readers of this column might have noticed that I don't do restaurant reviews. I'm not one of your A A Gills or Fay Maschlers. I've never been to Mezzo ... read more

A weeping willow bows silently towards the vitreous waters of the Seine. It is too cold for snow. Naked trees - still, frozen - flank the crumbling buildings with their ... read more

When people of earnest goodwill debate the future of the Internet and its effect upon journalism, it does not take long before someone raises the question of the growing gap ... read more

I've just come back from nine days in Cuba. Very weird. They have two economies, one based on US dollars and the other on local pesos. I kept on meeting ... read more

Joan Bakewell

Some big, impressive books this year, hard on the wrist but stimulating. Consilience (Little, Brown, £18.99) by Edward O Wilson does more than keep the Darwinian debate going. ... read more

Like most little girls, my erotic awakening was closely linked to my prepubescent passion for horses. The first distracted tingling to the written page happened as I thrilled to the ... read more

Here is a group of books that are, in the main, charting failure; the first fruits of the end of the optimistic narrative of growth fuelled by South-east Asia and ... read more

Lisa Jardine on Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses

If one is not to be facile or parochial, selecting a "best" book for the entire 20th century is a daunting task. ... read more

Everyone knows that there are two kinds of stories for children: one in which good children live happily doing ordinary things; the other in which life is transformed by magic ... read more

One field of publishing has to be run by inspired guesswork. Authors and publishers of literary fiction or biography can at least write and publish what they like themselves, and ... read more

Children like poetry for its imagined worlds, emotional resonance and the way that its sounds and shapes reveal the character and texture of words. There are the galloping rhymes and ... read more

For William Blake the ear was "a whirlpool fierce to draw creations in" and "a golden ascent winding round to the heaven of heavens". Despite his pictorial talents, Blake perceived ... read more

Considering the habitual British distaste for foreigners and learning musical instruments, Captain Corelli's Mandolin was a brave title for a novel. But Louis de Bernieres clearly knew what he was ... read more

The one good thing about the disappearance of small independent publishers in the face of the expansion of large international media corporations is that having your book rejected is a ... read more

There is no heaven or hell; there are, however, biographers . . . If we live after our deaths, it is as mimed selves in the memories and dreams of ... read more

No 3555 Set by Gordon Gwilliams

You were asked for prose that included terms found in the New Oxford Dictionary of English: lunch box, black information, Barnum effect, car bra, ... read more

This Toys'R'Us store looks, at first glance, like a big white temple dedicated to novelty. CD-Roms of bosomy Lara Croft (£34.99 for Tomb Raider 3), ready to slot into your ... read more

I was going to save this information until the next significant dinner party silence but, deferred gratification never having been my strong point, I might as well lean back smugly ... read more