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Justin Webb is the senior BBC man in the US and we've heard an awful lot of him in the 2008 presidential campaign. To be fair to him, he seemed to convey a certain respect for John McCain. In particular, he seemed moved by McCain's connection with American military veterans. But then, McCain was always the Republican who suited what we might call liberal European sensibilities. Damn it, he suited mine. Anyway, he was up against The One, whose election was not so much a coronation as an ascension. Mr Webb could not have predicted that within a book's deadlines, but was right to say that the presidential election is crucially about an assessment of character. We can guess (Mr Webb doesn't speculate) that McCain might have failed that even if he had been up against a human being.

Where Justin Webb seems useless is in his portrayal of American vigour. He rightly notes that the place is big and dangerous and that this is formative. He understands that the unifying feature of the country is the self-sufficiency that this size has produced. He seems to understand the American belief in the merit of success. Henry James wrote to William (it might have been the other way round) about the elemental blur of American modernity: I think this meant that Americans were unafraid to make something bigger than themselves.

But I don't think Mr Webb has quite internalised the sheer force of American acceptance of the need to avoid failure. This is the dark and energising side of American optimism. It explains the Goth in Gotham City.

Those shockable pioneers
Mr Webb fails us in several other ways, and again in spite of nearly getting there. Far too late in the book, and too briefly, he says that Americans are terribly shockable. And in the next breath he says that they will remain cursed by what Simon Schama calls the Original Sin of slavery and racism. Whilst Mr Webb acknowledges that men like Bill Cosby lay much of the blame for America's malaise at the door of black people themselves (in particular, black men), this polite BBC man doesn't begin to get his hands dirty with discussing the issue as it deserves.

As an ordinarily sweary European, Mr Webb finds the language of political correctness spectacularly numbing. He's right, it is. As Stephen Fry seeks to capture this essential American fact, the large cabbie lapses throughout his shows to an awed, "Oh my!". Mr Webb for his part notes that "Gosh!" is a poor substitute for "God!".

But Webb doesn't press this stuff home any more than he is useful on race. He doesn't notice the links between these issues. I have met many Americans who are appalled by the moral failure of the American black. Sure, their view is judgmental. But the point is that for many Americans, not getting with the programme is an elementary, un-American failing. What could be worse than not accepting the American challenge and instead becoming a large part of the failure of the American dream?

This reminds us that the European thinks society ought to fix the black problem; the Americans think that each black person ought to.

Those parochial cosmopolitans
America is an immigrant country in which the cosmopolitan remains parochial. The country's countrified land-locked mid-states are as politely puritanical as the villages whence their inhabitants sprang. Its citified coastal states have determined on a political politeness for fear of mayhem. And then, in all parts, there are people who burst out of these constraints, sometimes gloriously, and sometimes in depressed, drugged and drunken rebellion. Wouldn't you? I'm a bit Tourettesish in loose Britain and in the US I often feel like an unexploded bomb. But I feel small too: I am not as big-boned as an American. I can be energised by the place one moment and overwhelmed the next.

The European liberal mind cannot begin to like or defend America except by blanking out the majority of America which is not remotely European. It is not merely that almost all Americans are self-reliant, in a way which denies essential European habits of mind. It is more that most American thinking is less cluttered. It is less complex. Edith Wharton said the American mind had no foreground: I think she meant that it lacked nuance.

The results can be peculiar. For instance, the Constitution enshrines free speech, so this preternaturally courteous country is locked in endless rows about the right to offend. There is also something very American about certainty. The European liberal mind thinks it safe only to believe in what science declares to be beyond doubt. As to the rest, a nuanced scepticism is likely to keep one safe. That will do for many Americans, the ones the Americans like.

But others like the certainty of moral codes or scripture or made-up creeds, and they feel less need to refer to others as they settle on these beliefs. This diversity of certainty is offensive to the European mind, for whom these matters have been settled consensually.

When Justin Webb defends America he is really telling us how many Americans are quite like us, but more polite and hard-working. The millions of Americans who are polite and hard-working but not really like us at all seem to be more or less off his radar or marked as clearly hazardous or ridiculous. I suspect that he isn't crazy about the unhinged Americans who populate much of the best of American culture. That all these are authentically American means that his defence of the place is way too partial - I mean, patchy - to work.

The cabbie keeps talking
Stephen Fry's mindset is not very different from Mr Webb's. As he takes us on his taxi-ride around the US, he is not ostensibly defending the place, though in his accompanying notes (in interviews and on his website) that seems to be his mission. It is easier to warm to Mr Fry's account. He seems a nice old thing. But he has a striking narrowness of mind, best exemplified by the disdain with which he passed by Miami as too horrid to detain him. He sneers too easily. I doubt that he is quite as clever as he thinks, though he clearly has a good memory and has an intense middlebrow love of science.

He redeemed himself by sometimes saying the unexpected. He obviously relished aspects of the American mind which don't seem to charm Mr Webb. So Fry takes us to Los Alamos and does thrill to the sheer boldness of the nuclear vision. And he does see the point of cruising Lake Powell, Arizona in a big fat houseboat. But for much of the time he seems to be falling into the very trap he says he wants to avoid: he introduces various American curiosities and responds to them as a true liberal child of Hampstead, London, England, Europe.

Schama = genius minus logic
Simon Schama's series seems much less defensible than the other enterprises. If your Big Idea is that you're going to be clever, it's a pity if you can't proceed in a roughly logical way. The shows' notion was to unleash a giant mind on America’s past so as to see its present and future more clearly. Actually it was a love letter to Barack Obama, but never mind.

The first episode explained how various American agricultural and conservation luminaries pointed out early in the 20th century that water would be scarce and needed harvesting. They were ignored, so the West became a dustbowl. And somehow, according to Professor Schama, ignoring those early greens has produced the effect that the Colorado River is over-mined and global warming will produce a new disaster.

Professor Schama ignores the way the Dustbowl experience taught people how to farm in ways which far exceeded the expectations of the people who said the West couldn't grow much. Sure, America still wastes water, but it may sip it when it decides it needs to. Indeed, the process has already started, as a contributor points out.

No-one knows the carrying capacity of the American West. But the big point is that historically hardly anyone guessed that burning fossil fuels might create a huge problem. Sure, it may be difficult to survive the global warming experience, but there isn't much in America's history which can teach us how to do so.

Except of course, the lesson Schama probably doesn't like: that one goes on crashing through the barriers which constrain us. American realism takes the form of not being bullied by reality. This is why America and the old Soviet Union were so well-matched, though the US had efficiency and honesty on its side. And, sure, America may well have to refine its founding belief that plenitude is the nation's birthright. But it may usefully retain the American naivety that produces solutions.

Schama at war
I thought Schama's case on America's militarism bizarre. It was a moody bleat about the horrors of war. These are self-evident and teach us very little. It was also an account of an arcane historical row about whether the US should have a standing army. Yawn.

Then we got stuck into Schama's argument that wars which are wrongly conceived and badly executed are likely be less moral than noble wars cleverly executed. I always try to yawn when a solipsism is rammed down my throat. Given Schama's liberal prejudices, it was obvious that Bush The Younger's Iraq war was in the disaster category. Schama lined up various nice military vets who agreed with this argument, and we were supposed to believe that this made his case. Blimey. (As Justin Webb and I are both too inclined to write.)

Schama at prayer
The episode on religion made rather similar moves. In the 60s the young Schama was struck by the conviction, courage and faith of black activists. The churches and gospel were crucial to the liberation movement. And so it is now with Obama, noted Schama. So that's alright then.

Along the way, Simon Schama noted that the white evangelicals have been important to Republican politics, and he implied that it was the Democrats' turn to draw on the religious well. Of course, the obvious point would be that it is bizarre that in the twenty-first century anyone should believe that God might be biddable as to which side of America's politics He might favour, if any. One prays to be in line with God's wishes, not to have Him fall in with one's own. McCain was attractive in getting that right.

To be fair to Simon Schama, he spoke to a white mega-Church preacher who said that he wasn't into political preaching. Actually, the preacher's point was rather Republican: the state can't solve much and so praying for this or that party might be a diversion of spiritual resources. Again to be fair to both our authors, Justin Webb had been rather good on this territory. He was of course bemused by American religiosity, but also noted that its writ was nowhere near a powerful as its voice was loud. Just powerful enough, though, our authors note, for McCain to make the mistake of running with Sarah Palin.

Thank goodness for Sarah Palin. Without her, many liberal Americans and their apologists would be forced to see that McCain was their man.

A less American US
Here's the rub. It is possible that the US will become rather less exceptional, and a bit more European, or Australian, or whatever. Globalisation may be like that. If and when America does become more ordinary, we will lose a lot that we love about the place. The musicals, the pioneering social movements, the making of modernity, the willingness to fight huge wars for the right causes, the openness to immigration. The universities. The Wire, The Sopranos, The West Wing, Curb Your Enthusiasm. And yes, remembering Top Gear, the giant, throbbing V8 engine. Who knows? The US has yet to become as oriental and as Latin as it is going to be, and we have no idea what that will be like.

A full-on defence
There is only one big thought which links Bronwen Maddox with Justin Webb and it is that defending America is much easier if you take George W. Bush out of the equation. However, it is only Ms Maddox who bothers to see the continuities between Bush and the presidents who preceded him. She goes further, saying some continuity between him and his successors won't go amiss. Thus, appearances to the contrary, President Clinton was no more serious than Bush in bucking American realities about climate change.

Similarly, Bush's unilateralism was neither exceptional nor total, nor without merit. Bronwen Maddox goes very much further than would be considered polite in Hampstead in defending recent American foreign policy. She draws the line at Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib, but otherwise sees merit or at least decent intention in what America has done. I am a tad more enthusiastic - perhaps less reasonable or sensible - but cannot fault this trim, valuable, coherent book.

Bronwen Maddox's view is not that of a propagandist and still less of a perverse one. She seems to want to take an unflinching look at the country she loves. And she begins in the right place: she is reluctant to pick and choose what to cringe over. That is surely the point: it's only the "bad" bits of America which are worth defending. And the bad bits are interwoven very tightly with the best.

Richard D. North is the author of Mr Blair's Messiah Politics: Or what happened when Bambi tried to save the world (Social Affairs Unit, 2006) and its 2007 digital update Mr Blair's Messiah Politics: A story of inspired government, 1997-2007.

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On now virtually complete statistics, Obama received 52.7 per cent of the popular vote (66.6 million) compared with 46 per cent for McCain (58.2 million), and 1.1 per cent (1.5 million) for minor candidates.

Obama's margin of victory does not begin to compare with others in modern times: Lyndon Johnson (in 1964 against Barry Goldwater), Richard Nixon (in 1972 against George McGovern), and Ronald Reagan (in 1984 against Walter Mondale) each received about 60 per cent of the total Presidential vote, far higher than Obama's share. Obama's percentage was lower than that received by George H.W. Bush (54 per cent) in 1988 when he defeated Michael Dukakis; Bush proved to be an unpopular and unsuccessful one-term President and was defeated for reelection in 1992.

Nor were the 2008 results uniform across the United States. Obama ran up huge majorities in California, New York, Illinois (his home state), Massachusetts, and other liberal bastions, but lost most of the south and the west. Unnoticed by most commentators, he decisively lost Louisiana to McCain, although the Hurricane Katrina debacle was widely seen as a nail in the Republicans' coffin. McCain lost very narrowly in Florida, Ohio, Indiana, Iowa, North Carolina, and Virginia, and by only slightly more in states like Wisconsin. A change in two million or so votes in these states, less than two per cent of those cast, would have given McCain the White House. Had the great storm over the apocalyptic catastrophe about to overtake the World Economy not blown up in mid-September, McCain would quite probably have won: to reiterate, he was ahead at that point.

Rather remarkably, too, voter turnout did not massively increase, either as the result of the charismatic Obama luring youth and ethnic minorities into the ballot box, or for any other reason. About 126 million people voted for President on November 4. In 2004, when the uncharismatic George W. Bush and John Kerry faced off, about 121.4 million people voted. Given America's population increase in four years, turnout in 2008 was quite possibly below that in 2004.

Nor did the election reflect any basic social or demographic changes in America's population mix, as has been widely suggested. The percentage of Afro-Americans in the total population of the United States is the same today as ten, thirty, or sixty years ago: about 11 per cent. More might well have voted for a black candidate than in the past, but 90 per cent of American blacks always vote Democratic. There are more Hispanics and Asians than before, but most American Hispanics are stable Spanish-speaking Caucasians from Mexico, whose grandchildren will be indistinguishable from the rest of the white population, while most Asians are upwardly mobile Chinese, Indians, and Japanese who were as likely to vote for McCain.

A visible portion of the "youth vote" campaigned for Obama, but at what election in modern times has there not been a highly visible left-liberal contingent of young activists? On the contrary, McCain's vote held up as well as it did because there are relatively more "family value" white Protestants and Catholics than more marginal groups, and stable Methodists, Lutherans, and Baptists from "Main Street" are a lot more likely to have large families and transmit their values intergenerationally than are hippies from San Francisco or the faculty of Columbia University.

What gave Obama his win was that the white working class in industrial states like Ohio and Pennsylvania believed that Obama was much more likely to save their jobs than was McCain - it is as simple as that.

This is not to say that McCain ran an admirable campaign. He did not: indeed, his campaign was certainly one of the most inept I can recall. It had no theme, and no constructive plans to alleviate the financial crisis. What he should have promised, self-evidently, was a massive income tax cut for everyone: say, an immediate five per cent cut in all levels of income tax. He should have made this the theme of his campaign. He would have won. The choice of Sarah Palin was probably, on balance, a mistake, although it probably made little difference to the outcome.

In the meantime, Obama's supporters are likely to be very disappointed by him. He is likely to be much more cautious, even conservative, than most of them would like. Contrary to what right-wing bloggers allege, he is not a flaming radical at all, let alone the secret agent of Osama (Obam?) Bin Laden. He is an inexperienced politician who is likely to find himself out of his depth very quickly. The Republican party arguably has more reasons for hope than it might now credit.

William D. Rubinstein is professor of modern history at the University of Wales-Aberystwyth. He is the author of Israel, the Jews, and the West: The Fall and Rise of Antisemitism, Men of Property: The Very Wealthy in Britain since the Industrial Revolution, (Social Affairs Unit, 2006) and co-author of The Richest of the Rich: The Wealthiest 250 People in Britain Since 1066, (Harriman House, 2007).

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As the Ottoman threat receded, tensions opened up between the Croats and their overbearing Hungarian neighbours, and with the Serb orthodox population. The growth of Italian nationalism and territorial demands on Dalmatia created a new front in the west and north-west. In order to meet these challenges, nineteenth century Croatian nationalists manned, as Magas expertly puts it, educational, linguistic and cultural "fortifications" in defence of their schools and language. By 1900, the country was, or believed itself to be, beleaguered on all sides by Italians, Hungarians, Serbs who sought a "Greater Serbia" and - most worryingly of all - the Germans, whose Drang nach Osten threatened to swamp the intervening Slav peoples.

It was for this reason that the Croats, along with the Slovenes, were so keen on the first Yugoslav state of 1918, the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, because union with Serbia seemed to guarantee the only protection against Italian or German domination. But the shot-gun marriage with a Belgrade Serb elite which was much more interested in expansion towards Macedonia and the Aegean was not a happy one. In one particularly extreme incident three Croat deputies, including the legendary leader of the Croat peasants’ party Stjepan Radic, were shot dead by a Serb nationalist MP in the parliamentary chamber. Only in 1939 was a power-sharing agreement worked out.

Not long afterwards, however, royalist Yugoslavia disintegrated at the onslaught of Hitler's Germany in 1941, and was broken up into a congeries of occupation zones and puppet states.

One of these was the "New Independent State of Croatia" under Ante Pavelic. His fascist Ustashe movement unleashed a merciless campaign of genocide against the Serb Orthodox population under his control. "Kill a third, expel a third, convert a third", was the slogan. Here Pavelic was not merely indulging a pathological bloodlust, but mapping out a new geopolitical destiny for Croatia. As one ustashe paper argued,

it is sufficient to cast a cursory glance at the map to see that Croatia, Slavonia, Dalmatia are just the edges of historical Croatia, whose heart is Bosnia-Herzegovina.

As Branka Magas persuasively argues, Pavelic's regime was deeply unpopular, not only because of its atrocities but for its turn away from Dalmatia. To the horror of Croatian nationalist opinion, he surrendered the Adriatic coastline to Mussolini's Italy, his long-time sponsor. Tito's communist partisan movement, by contrast was able to articulate not only a much more inclusive vision, but was also an effective defender of the Croat national interest. The Italians were eventually chased not only out of their occupation zone, but had to surrender Istria - their booty from World War One - as well.

What held Tito's Yugoslavia together after 1945, and especially after the breach with Stalin in 1948, was the fear of Russian invasion. So long as that remained acute, Croatia snuggled up closely to the other Yugoslav Republics, and ethnic relations between Croats and Serbs within Croatia itself were subordinated to the primacy of foreign policy.

It is no accident for example, that the stirrings of nationalism during the "Croatian Spring" took place at a time of international détente, when east-west relations were improving. By contrast, Serbs and Croats closed ranks when Soviet power loomed large, as it did with the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968.

It was the end of the Cold War under Gorbachev as much as the death of Tito in 1980 which loosened the bonds between Croatia and Yugoslavia, and put relations between Serbs and Croats within the republic back on the agenda. Even before Croatia declared her independence in the early summer of 1991, Serb militias sponsored by Belgrade had begun to partition the country.

Yet while Croatia's elite and much of public opinion looked west, towards "Europe", the new President, Franjo Tudjman, remained fixated, as Pavelic had been, on Bosnia. Thousands of Croat regulars were sent there, initially to fight the Serbs and then to assist local Croat militias in their struggle against the legitimate government in Sarajevo. Only military defeat and American diplomatic intervention forced Tudjman to abandon his annexationist dreams.

At the moment, Magas concludes, Croatia is firmly set on the path to integration into the European Union. It remains to be seen whether this will be end of the story, or is merely the latest in a long line of choices the Croats have come to regret. As the kaleidoscope is shaken once again by the Kosovan declaration of independence, Croatia may recall how little "Europe" did to help them in 1991.

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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Well designed office products by Olivetti and Italian coffee machines alike are regarded as having been made to promote the benefits of the free market. There is a dreadful ambiguity here. They did promote the benefits of the free market. Under no other system would it have been possible to design them in a way that would appeal to customers and fulfil a felt need.

Let us have no nonsense about advertisers promoting false needs. Is coffee a false need? Were the Germans who drank Ersatzkaffee made of acorns during and after World War II as false in their needs as in their coffee? Should the "false" Olivetti typewriter and its successor the word processor be ditched to bring back hunched male clerks on high stools writing copper plate in ledgers? Was it wrong to deskill Mr Pooter, the City calligrapher, and hand his work over to the pert young female products of the Board schools just to satisfy a false need for legibility?

Elsewhere in the exhibition we are asked to admire "Hedwig Bollhagen's
elegant unadorned" East German coffee set 1961, produced by one of East Germany's leading ceramicists. Her work never went into mass production even though she owned one of the country's few private businesses (her goods were traded under the counter) nor that there was never any decent coffee to put in such coffee cups as there were. In East Germany you had to measure out your life without coffee spoons. We were endlessly told during the cold war that the prices paid to peasants growing coffee were too low, never that a key reason for this was the unwillingness of the Soviet block to allow their consumers to buy the coffee they wanted.

Many of the East European designs in this exhibition were mere prototypes that never went into production. Sometimes they are elegant but it is the elegance of a Potemkin village. In an aristocratic society it is possible to admire the craftsmanship of a one-off coffee service for the very rich and to ignore the dirty clay pots from which the poor sup their beer but in industrial societies production ought to be for the broad masses and design must reflect this.

Soviet design could not do so because no-one ever considered the wishes of ordinary people. In fairness, from an aesthetic point of view, it was an egalitarian society. Even the elite lived ugly, though in far more comfortable ugliness than the moujiks. There were no Fabergė Easter eggs, but then there was no Easter either, the key occasion that in Tsarist times had brought beauty into the world of the peasant.

The well-designed Italian goods did promote the virtues of the free market but that was not their main purpose. After they had been produced, no doubt they could be placed in exhibitions and used to illustrate the superiority of the West over Soviet socialism but so what? When you are competing for prestige or propaganda you compete with what you've got.

The curators' waspish comments on the Italian Vespa motor scooter are even crasser than those about Olivetti. They stress that the Vespa was adapted from scooters used by US parachutists during the Second World War in order to portray Western goods as a spin-off of militarism. One of the sillier critics writing about the exhibition, who presumably got his ideas from what he saw, adds that the Vespa was

mass-produced with American money to bind the once-fascist nation to its consumerist cause.

Consumerism is not an ideology, not a Weltanshauung in the sense that Fascism and Communism were. Putting the suffix –ism on something does not make it a belief system. In truth there is no such thing as consumerism. Our central belief is that individuals should be free to make choices - that is our ideology; the providers of goods and services merely compete for the attention of free women and men. That is all. A scooter is a scooter is a scooter. It is not an ideology but an effective means of transportation. It only becomes an advertisement for capitalism because it does well what it is designed to do.

It is amazing to see in the exhibition as an example of good East European design a "Trabi", an East German Trabant motor car. On days when the wind blew from the East it was the main source of pollution in West Berlin. After reunification it had to be banned because of the amount of dirt it put into the air. In what sense was it well designed? It doesn't even look good.

The Eastern jokers knew far more about cars than the V&A:

How do you double the value of a Trabi?
Fill the petrol tank.

Why has the Lada got a heated rear window?
So that it keeps your hands warm when you push it through the snow.

The Soviets could not even design civilian planes that worked. Their internal airlines were notorious for their bad safety record, something they concealed from their own public by not permitting stories about air crashes to get into the press. If the Soviets could design an outstanding jet fighter for their covert pilots to use in the Korean War, why could they not design a plane that could get their own citizens safely from Moscow to Tashkent or Kiev?

But the exhibition does not mention these grotesque failures that reveal how worthless Soviet design was - instead it highlights Soviet propaganda successes, notably Sputnik the first satellite and Vostok the first space capsule, the one that took Yuri Gagarin into orbit, following the dog Laika. There is a huge Soviet poster of him in the exhibition by Vadim Volikov entitled "Glory to Soviet Science, Glory to Soviet Man - the First Cosmonaut, 1961". Gagarin is flanked by a rocket and holds a red sphere in his hand with a hammer and sickle on it. The idiots running the exhibition comment

perhaps it represents the planet's future as a socialist world without national, social or class divisions.

There is one richly comic item though - the full pressure space suit worn by Alexsei Leonov for his first space walk. It was so rigid that he had problems getting back into the spacecraft through the airlock and got stuck, presumably with his head back in and his arse sticking out in space. What a wonderful comedy film that would have made. No wonder the Russians never got to the moon.

It is the principle of the entire exhibition that Soviet posters, prototypes, rhetoric and imagined utopias are placed in opposition to western achieved design. Even the Soviet lead in rockets was a mark of their incompetence in design. The Soviets could not make their warheads smaller, so they had to make their rockets bigger and ended up bolting together World War II style German rockets. Sputnik was a by-product of this and is in essence a triumph of Nazi science and of the Nazi scientists kidnapped and forcibly deported to the Soviet Union in 1945-6.
But no one in Moscow dared to sing the local equivalent of

... the widows and cripples in old London town,
Who owe their large pensions to Wernher von Braun

The only small things the Soviets ever pioneered were the miniature cameras and recording devices for the KGB on display in the exhibition. Even jewellery imitated this as in Vaclav Cagler's Neck Piece (Czech) 1968-9, a piece of futuristic jewellery with mirrored discs for covert observation. Socialist production maximises the use of raw materials because that makes total production look larger which looks good in the figures and socialist design goes for size for a similar reason. Never tell a socialist that size doesn't matter.

It was not that their designers arbitrarily chose clumsiness but rather that a system in which value is measured by cost (as in the British educational system) forced clumsiness upon them.

The transistor was an American invention and the transistor radio a Japanese triumph. If it had been left to the Soviets they would have gone on using valves because for all their investment in science education (some of it better than ours) they could never innovate. In turn their designers would have gone on producing huge boxes to hold the radios taking up half the space in their average working class family's tiny living room. It would have been seen as a suitable outlet for the huge speeches of the Soviet leaders. It would be interesting to know how quickly they phased valves out when the transistor arrived since socialist planners do not like liquidating obsolete physical plant, even though it has become effectively worthless.

There is a curious insert in the middle of the exhibition covering the year 1968. Here for reasons that are obscure is a poster from the radical French Atelier Populaire 1968, telling us "Voter c'est mourir un peu", (To vote is to die a little), showing a coffin with a ballot box on top and marked with de Gaulle's Cross of Lorraine. It is accompanied by illustrations and accounts of the police putting down student riots in France and Italy. But there is also a photo of an utterly empty Wenceslas Square in Prague. In the foreground is the photographer's watch on a wrist, showing the time when a planned rally would have been at full strength. It had been cancelled because the Warsaw pact forces had warned that they would crush it with the utmost violence.

Here we see, though it is not remarked on in the exhibition, the total contrast between the crushed Czechs who wanted freedom to vote and to purchase and the cowardly pampered scum of Paris and Milan who were against voting, against freedom, against consumption and who knew that in a democratic country they could be violent with impunity. De Gaulle was not going to crush them beneath the tracks of his tanks.

In Milan in 1968 Giancarlo de Carlo installed a barricade of freezers and television sets in the Milan Triennale held in the Palazzo dell' Arte

fashioned from the debris of modern capitalism ...[to] draw attention to the effects of modern consumerism on society.

There is something sickening about radicals who protested against the goods that were making life easier for ordinary working-class housewives but who loved Mao Tse Tung and the Cultural Revolution and even imitated its uniforms. The mass murders the famines and the total lack of freedom were acceptable to them as were the public humiliation of ordinary individuals on a scale not seen since the Nazis made the Jews scrub the streets of Vienna.

There is also much that is sickening about this exhibition that praises the horrors of socialism with faint damns. The Soviet Union in the cold war was not an alternative road to modernism and modernity but a stagnant society that blocked all possibility of reform. At the time we feared communism because of its military power. Today we despise it for its failure. The cold war was a just war and we won. That is all you need to know. There is only one reason for going to the exhibition at the V and A and that is to sneer.

Christie Davies travelled extensively in the Soviet bloc during the cold war. He is the author of Jokes and their Relation to Society, (Berlin, Mouton de Gruyter, 1998) in which he shows how ordinary people in those countries expressed their hatred of socialism and its failures through humour.

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I am not sure when exactly the belief in the ability of forms (correctly filled) to avert all human disaster took hold of the official, legal and popular mind. Insofar as the greatest of all human disasters is the attachment of blame to people higher-up in an administration and, a fortiori, to their political masters, the belief might be said to be wholly justified. There is nothing quite like a fetish for procedure to disguise the essence of any situation.

Ofcom, the bureaucracy that describes itself as "the independent regulator and competition authority for the UK communications industries", and whose staff increased from 23 to 776 between 2004 and 2005 alone (a fact that surely offers some insight into the nature of our current economic predicament), also believes in the efficacy of forms in distracting attention from the essence of an unpleasant situation.

According to The Times of 29th October, Ofcom will want to know why the BBC's "compliance systems" failed to prevent the now-notorious broadcast by Russell Brand and Jonathan Ross, in the course of which they made obscene telephone calls to a 78 year-old man about his granddaughter's sexual activities with one of them.

I quote The Times:

After the recording of The Russell Brand Show, the programme's producer, Nic Philps, a 25-year-old son of a vicar, would have been expected to fill in a compliance form detailing whether it had any offensive content. If Mr Philps judged that it did, he would have had to explain how he justified offending listeners… Ofcom will want to know whether that form was filled correctly, and if it was, who from the more senior echelons of the BBC countersigned it as required… An error by a relatively small-fry staff member can be explained away. If the top dog is involved, that is not so easy.

It said editorial control and compliance procedures in non-news areas of the BBC's Audio and Music department were "inadequate and need to be strengthened".

Let me pose the real problem. The senior management of the BBC has long seen fit to subsidise two serial vulgarians at enormous public expense. They are, indeed, paid to be vulgar: vulgarity is their stock-in-trade, though the euphemism "edgy" is used sometimes to describe the vulgar drivel that the peddle.

When one of them, Mr Ross, asked the leader of the opposition whether, as a 12 year-old boy, he had masturbated while thinking about Mrs Thatcher, the management of the BBC saw fit to do nothing (of the leader of the opposition's agreement to appear on the programme in the first place, I will say nothing). In the opinion of the BBC's management, therefore, this is the kind of enquiry that should be heavily subsidised by the British taxpayer.

The problem is not one of errors of judgement, but of faults of character. (The same, incidentally, might be said of the Deripaska affair.) It does not, after all, need even a fraction of a second's reflection to know that the offending telephone calls should not have been thought of, let alone made; and that, once made, they should not have been broadcast.

It is also obvious that the kind of people who think of such calls, make them, and then broadcast them, are the kind of people who should not be employed in any capacity whatever in the BBC.

Mr Brand's filmed statement that is available on the internet demonstrates that he does not understand the moral significance of what he did. He accepts that the phone calls were "really, really stupid," itself a self-exculpatory euphemism, and goes on to say that it was particularly stupid as the recipient of the calls was someone whom he greatly admired. This has the corollary, of course, that if the recipient had not been admired by him, and had been chosen, say, at random from a telephone directory or from the electoral roll, the calls would have been considerably less reprehensible. The appalling egotism of this hardly needs pointing out.

The argument in favour of the employment of these two state-subsidised vulgarians is that millions of people enjoy their work. No doubt this is so, but it is not at all to anyone's credit: it is, rather, a sad, and indeed tragic, commentary on the cultural condition of millions of people, a condition brought about, at least in part, by a corrupt elite that has consistently repudiated cultivation, refinement, subtlety and intelligence in favour of coarseness and stupidity.

A curious thing about the whole episode is that no one in Britain takes the trouble to think how it must appear in the eyes of foreigners. Included in the doctrine of multiculturalism, of course, is the arrogant demand that others must accept us as we are, which (among other reasons) is why the young British behave with such conspicuous vulgarity wherever they go, and makes them - rightly - loathed and despised.

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.

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Obama is an interesting candidate, for sure. He is fluent, cool and easy in his skin. He is steely, ruthless or tough according to your taste. In all these respects he reminds us of Blair.

But we should not pursue that comparison too far. The essential thing about Blair was that he had a class chip on his shoulder. It was incomprehensible, but it was there. He acted working class. Obama does not seem to be pretending to be anything. He's not pretending to be from the hood. He's not pretending to come from a redneck state, as George W. Bush did with his faux-Texan identity. And he's not playing the feel-your-pain card as Bill Clinton seemed to do with his fractured background.

Actually, though, one could say that Obama is pretending to be black and that is something which wits often laid at Bill Clinton's door. One of the reasons race will change in America is that there'll be too much mixing up of the races for racism to work well. Like an increasing number of blacks, Obama is genetically half-white. It should be meaningless to ask whether he is white or black culturally, and not much comfort that it is a question more importantly asked by blacks than whites.

But I do think it is fair to accuse Barack Obama of having pretended to have found his former pastor Wright's cast of mind attractive. I think too highly of Barack to believe that he meant it. I prefer to believe that Obama could not resist hoovering up a little more blackness than he felt, or even that he felt the need to live out a blackness which was as near to authentic simplicity as he could find.

Unlike nearly everyone, I disliked Obama's race speech in Philadelphia this March. It tried to argue that blacks had to be allowed the awfulness of some of their race-based rhetoric. The speech had two great merits. It worked. And it showed how powerful and awful the legacy of race remains in America. I don't say Obama was wrong to make the speech, but it remains a pandering effort. It reminded us that the man who has helped knife race as a political issue and to transcend it, could only achieve power by sloshing nonsense over this key issue.

I am ambivalent about the prospect of an Obama presidency partly because it ought to matter that if Obama had been white he would not have been on offer. We would presumably be debating the merits of a Hillary Clinton candidacy. Mrs Clinton would equally have been an identity politics candidate, so there's some parity there. But Senator McCain would be looking better than he does now. He would have been fighting a routine candidate, not The One.

About three-quarters of the time, Senator McCain has said far wiser and more decent things than Senator Obama. But he has also seemed less steady than one requires of a President. So one isn't thrilled by the choice to be made between the two men.

I feel much warmer toward an Obama presidency when I consider the following. The whole world, let alone America, needs the US to have a black president at some point and probably right now. Good or bad, blackness will be a hugely valuable factor in an American president at this moment. And I mean abroad as much as at home. The wider non-caucasian world will note Obama's colour and his middle name. It will help them get over themselves.

It is also hugely valuable that Barack Obama seems like a black man who is less hung up by his race and has given it far fewer political hostages than it is likely another black politician would have managed.

Maybe merely by finessing America's race politics in his own brilliant style Barack Obama has shown the smarts and the reserves a president needs. And hell, he may govern much more like a Republican - a sound government Tory - than anyone supposes. He may govern as the kind of Republican we softies always hoped McCain might have been.

We can be sure of one thing. If he lives and thrives long enough, which we must ardently hope for, he will cease to be The One. And that'll be two good lessons learned. The race lesson is obvious. The lesson that politics is not religion will be just as useful.

Richard D. North is the author of Mr Blair's Messiah Politics: Or what happened when Bambi tried to save the world (Social Affairs Unit, 2006) and its 2007 digital update Mr Blair's Messiah Politics: A story of inspired government, 1997-2007.

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First there is the question of representation. One person can "represent" another in lots of ways - by putting his views, by being like him, by having the same views, etc. The question of how one person can represent a multitude is hugely complex. But when I think of contemporary America and I think of the classes I teach for the University of California I think of Jews, Latins, Koreans, Indians, Chinese, Japanese who mix so easily that it makes more sense to talk about a "post-racial" society than a multi-racial one.

The same is true, for that matter, of a Chicago jazz club. Only when Americans of African extraction come into the picture does the concept of "race" become important. The bottom line is that Obama can represent contemporary America in ways that yet another elderly gentleman of "Scots-Irish" extraction can not.

And Obama, of partly African ancestry and largely European culture offers America a comparatively easy route to making its list of presidents look a deal more representative than it has so far. A "black" president will not be the final word in ending the legacy of slavery, but it will be the greatest single step towards that end which could ever be taken.

Even more important is the representation of the United States in the world at large. As it happens my passport is an exact contemporary of the George W. Bush presidency and - though I say it myself - it has an impressive array of stamps and visas from countries on five continents. In all of which the current president has managed to create a feeling of loathing for his country; he presents an image of the USA which almost nobody outside its borders finds attractive. An Obama presidency would refresh this instantly and anyone who wants to maintain America's position in the world should take that on board.

Presidential elections since 1945 have contained a profound anomaly at their core. Here is the choosing of the world's most powerful individual, but it is done by dozens of millions of Americans most of whom are astonishingly uninterested in the world. (Different figures are banded about for the number of Americans who have passports: 22% seems the most likely estimate, but it certainly isn't above 33%.)

So the president will be chosen by electors preoccupied with domestic economic and social issues and then spend his life on foreign policy. For my money the only US president to have a substantial impact on American life since 1945, given the rival claims of two houses of Congress, the Supreme Court, the constitution, 50 states et al., was Lyndon Johnson.

All of that I can say fairly dispassionately. I become more virulent when I consider the extreme wing of the Republican Party. They now call themselves "conservatives"; this was not true of the party of Lincoln (after whom I am named) in the past. The party has traditionally regarded itself as being at least as progressive as its rival, though with a different view of progress and I think this new nomenclature must be challenged. In fact I begin to enter Crocodile Dundee mode when I come across American "conservatives":

"You ain't a conservative: I'm a conservative. If you are a patriotic American your identity is defined by a constitution which embraces precisely the kind of universal principles which conservatism opposes by definition and essence. So if you really want to be a conservative you should write to Her Majesty apologising and asking to be taken back. Or you could simply move to Canada, a country which muddles along very well indeed with a set of institutions and compromises which nobody could have devised on principle. They even have a proper Conservative Party, which is very rare."

The whole point about conservatives is that they believe in reality: what we have works because it has had some practice in working and you shouldn't try to change it too much or too quickly because you'll only mess it up.

American "conservatives" believe in one or both of two unrealities. Economically, there is the "free market"; of course, I'm in favour of this too, but in real free markets created by strong, if restrained, states. They believe in the Lockean nonsense that you will have a free market if you have a weak state and they find it difficult when what they get is shysterism and gangsterism.

And then there is "social" conservatism, which seeks to conserve a world in which there are no homosexuals, in which people stay with the same partner for life and voluntarily take responsibility for their actions. Etc. A place of complete fantasy, not reality. I don't know which society ever got closest to this unattractive vision, but it certainly wasn't the Good Ole flipping USA.

The good thing about America is that they believe in freedom. And the bad thing about America is that they don't believe in freedom: they have even more repressive laws than other states and a substantial minority of the population would be more at home in Iran if they could surmount their prejudice against Islam.

In short, American "conservatives" are dangerous idealists and progressives who give real conservatives a bad name. I don't think John McCain is one, but he is supported by them and has compromised with them and his running mate, in her daft way, is one. In any case, he's an old man and a fraud and he addresses total strangers as "my friends". So this English Conservative will be rooting for Barack Obama.

A casual glance at some of the bizarre items in the bookshops or at some of the people at Republican rallies will convince you that there are those for whom the election of Obama will be deeply sinister and disturbing because it involves recognising America's change of identity. There is real pain and anger and if you think identity is primarily ethnic then you would be upset.

But it's been a long time coming and has been earnestly discussed since at least the 1870s; I was rather amused by a discussion in Tom Wolfe's Bonfire of the Vanities (1987) in which a Jewish-American DA and an Irish-American cop conclude that neither of them has ever met a "WASP". But I have every faith that American identity in a more important sense will survive and flourish because it always has. Plus ça change.

Lincoln Allison retired from an academic career at the University of Warwick in 2004 - and again in 2008 - to become a freelance writer and broadcaster. He remains Emeritus Reader in Politics at the University of Warwick and Visiting Professor in sport and leisure at the University of Brighton. His latest book is The Disrespect Agenda: Or How the Wrong Kind of Niceness Is Making Us Weak and Unhappy.

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It is useless for Stephen Glover to dress this up as a desperate relativism, as he did in the Mail. It is much more deliberate than merely a sort of post modern drift. It is no use Gordon Brown suggesting that Ross and Brand ought to see themselves as role models. That is as silly as imagining that Lenny Bruce or Peter Cook ought to have fretted over being a good influence.

It is completely useless to suppose that broadcasters could become a civilising influence. If they were more civilised, they'd lose any influence of any kind over the masses.

Modern street culture is cruder and ruder than it has ever been. It is impossible to portray or reflect or appeal to it without that plain and ghastly fact coming through. Terence Blacker in the Independent is wrong to say there is a mismatch between the real world and the media world in this respect. It is true that we fetishise niceness with our political correctness. But the underlying reality is a dramatic coarsening of nearly everyone's tongue.

Now it is of course possible that the BBC should remember its improving mission, and be satisfied with small, aspirational audiences. That seems to be the main call of Alexander Chancellor on the Guardian's Comment Is Free and Charles Moore on the Today Programme.

I rather approve of it. There should be no compulsion to contribute to nastiness. Nastiness, smuttiness and the many other delights of the clever ungoverned tongue ought to be available to paying adult audiences in darkened rooms late at night, as they were historically. This is perhaps an argument for subscription TV. But a BBC with smaller audiences will die even quicker than it is bound to.
Meantime, it would be silly to predict that the BBC will much draw in its horns. Its staff mostly love its new vulgarity and so do the demographic the smut is aimed at. The BBC will think that retreating from this stuff is cowardly and - oddly - uncivilised.

Seen in this light, the BBC's response to this drama reminds of how arrogant and clever the corporation is. It has sent its biggest star into very temporary exile and more to punish us than him. They want to remind us how much we enjoyed most of what he did, including (for a sizeable minority) his worst excesses.

And by tipping out only a middle-rank editorial executive, the Corporation's highest echelons show how committed they are to the behaviour of its very young rising stars. They have made the minimum sacrifice whilst declaring that for everyone else, it's business as much like usual as possible.

Richard D. North is the author of Rich is Beautiful: A Very Personal Defence of Mass Affluence and Scrap the BBC!: Ten Years to Set Broadcasters Free.

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We exposed ourselves to an extreme version of this by staying in the Illinois Amish country (which should read Amish and Mennonite) around Arthur and Arcola. This is not to be confused with the well-known and tourist-infested Amish country of Pennsylvania. Around Arthur the community drives its buggies largely unobserved by outsiders and eats rather dull Americanised mittel-European food in Grandma Yoder's local chain of restaurants.

For a classical libertarian it would be, I suppose, something to admire as it lived out its collective life in such resolute independence of the state. But I am a non-classical libertarian and it disturbed me to discover that the 47 Amish and Mennonite schools in the area limit their curriculum quite severely and strongly discourage "unnecessary" education, which is defined as learning beyond the eighth grade.

Nineteenth century social theory - Acton, Mill and Tocqueville - offered us an intense series of speculations about democracy and the tyranny of the majority. I remain at least partly persuaded by their more pessimistic speculations. Real republics - places like Athens, Rome and the US and as opposed to places (like Italy) which are just getting by with republican forms for lack of any alternative - have totalitarian tendencies. There is a strong norm of religious belief in America, much more powerful and better rooted than any norm of belief in Communism ever was anywhere. All serious candidates must be "born again" these days.

But when we use the stereotyping phrases "religious right", "bible belt" and so on it is as well to remember that the largest religion in the USA is actually Roman Catholicism; on the official census figures it is the faith of 28% of the population and this is certainly an underestimate because of illegal Mexican immigration.

Baptism is second having grown to 19%, with behind it a huge variety of smaller protestant sects led by the Presbyterians and Methodists. This all becomes blurred because Americans have far fewer inhibitions than Europeans about attending the services of more than one sect.

I must say, the religion which gives me the creeps is Baptism in its American forms. Like Islam it has no effective mechanisms of central legitimacy and thus licenses the claim to religious authority to the self appointed and lunatic. I also find the Baptists' Jesus as unrecognisable as he is repugnant.

I may not have believed in the divinity of the Jesus I was introduced to in the Anglican church and I didn't accept many of his ethical teachings, but at least he seemed to be a nice chap. He was (usually) calm and reflective and prescribed tolerance and forgiveness. He turned water into wine and said that you were unlikely to get to Heaven if you hoarded personal wealth. He turned the other cheek and warned of Hell as the absence of his Father's love. The whole point of him was that we were to move on from the primitivism of the Old Testament.

The Jesus you meet on Tennessee radio stations is almost the exact opposite. One feels that he would turn wine into water if he didn't prefer to bully you into abstemiousness. Hell is still a flamethrower up your backside for ever and serve you right. His preferred role in general is as a sort of bullying personal therapist with an unhealthy interest in his clients. It’s none of my business of course, but does this have anything to do with Christianity at all? Or is it a purely solipsistic and American nonsense, dressed in Christian forms for the sake of legitimacy?

I only attended one religious ceremony during my stay in the US. For obvious reasons it was in the Roman rite, a mass to celebrate the delightfully named "23rd Sunday in Ordinary Time" at St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York, but also the Labor Day parade.

I even briefly met the Cardinal Archbishop after the ceremony. His Eminence's sermon was polemical and political, emphasising altruism, the virtues of community and solidarity with poverty, the wickedness of greed, etc. He implied that, although abortion was a mortal sin, voting Republican wasn't far behind. (In broader context, this is the character of the church in New York rather than in the USA as a whole because polls show a majority of Catholics supporting McCain over Obama.) But the whole thing was recognisably Christian and quite different from the neo-Judaic, crypto-Islamic stuff they peddle on the other side of the Appalachians.

Lincoln Allison retired from an academic career at the University of Warwick in 2004 - and again in 2008 - to become a freelance writer and broadcaster. He remains Emeritus Reader in Politics at the University of Warwick and Visiting Professor in sport and leisure at the University of Brighton. His latest book is The Disrespect Agenda: Or How the Wrong Kind of Niceness Is Making Us Weak and Unhappy.

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About twenty per cent of the pre-owned car salesrooms and rodent exterminators along the small town strips of the country proclaim "God Bless America" which leaves you wondering whether they mean mainly America or only America or what.

And it is particularly irritating when the announcer at the US Open Tennis Championship at Flushing Meadow tells you that you are attending the world's greatest tennis tournament when you are sitting watching finals and semi-finals in an over-heated, under-attended concrete bowl where many of the spectators spend their time squabbling over the few seats which offer any shade. In terms of style or atmosphere, which are what matter in major sporting events, the US Open isn't fit to lick Wimbledon's bootstraps.

That American archetype the travelling salesman addresses me over breakfast in Lake Worth. With the casual, factual style of someone telling me that neither New York team has qualified for the baseball playoffs this year he informs me that "This is the best country in the world . . . " then adds, ". . . but it's in a hell of a mess right now". Because the TV is on in the background covering the endless saga of meltdowns and bail-outs.

So then he adds that i'’s the greediest country on earth. Best and greediest, huh? Polls show that 75% or 78% or 80% of Americans think their country is "headed in the wrong direction" or some sentiment along those lines though "conservative" Republicans have insisted until very recently that those who hold this view are the victims of whingeing leftist propaganda.

It is sometimes quite shocking to anyone from Europe to observe the ease with which you can turn on patriotic emotion in America; it seems more like the intensity that you get with small countries like Georgia or Norway than anything you would expect from a large, powerful country. We were at a charity concert of country music in Nashville; the theme seemed quite radical and critical because the funds were being raised to provide food for the "food banks" for those who were going hungry.

But then one of the singers burst into a speech about how his gran'pappy had won six purple hearts (!?) and this became a song about if it wasn't for the marines we'd be speaking German and living under the flag of Japan (That way round for reasons of scansion, I assume). Far from being sullen and embarrassed as they had been when the same singer did a Johnny Cash imitation, the audience stood to its feet and hooted and hollered with enthusiasm.

Yet when Joe Biden says it is patriotic to pay taxes they hoot and holler with derision. So it is: I love my country; Long Live America; God Bless America; I would do anything for America - except give it money. This is the Great American Schizophrenia: the nation is the greatest on earth, embodying the highest values and a manifest destiny to grow and to lead. But "the state" is to be resented; "Washington" is to be decried; "Big Government" is deeply corrupt.

Of course, to a non-American that which is loved and that which is hated are the same thing. "The greatest nation on earth" has no pre-existence as an ethnie in the way that European nations do to different degrees: it is purely the construction of the American state, a state which is to be feared and admired to high degrees because it has achieved the greatest feat of nation-building in history. Eat your heart out Soviet Union, Mexico, Canada, etc. because you never managed to do what the United States did with a potent mixture of force and propaganda.

If you were an American soldier born in 1830 you might have killed Mexicans, Southerners, dozens of "Native American" tribes and even Mormons for the integrity and expansion of your state-nation. Yet their descendants, far from exhibiting the resentment normal in such cases, go dewy-eyed at your star-spangled banner and put it on their altars and make their children swear your oath of allegiance. But you should not confuse having had the most successful nation-building exercise in history with being the best nation.

As usual, Alexis De Tocqueville explained this first. On the one hand there is the USA as a contingent reality, a particular story in time and space, perhaps more "exceptional" than most. But there is also the USA as an idea, the embodiment - according to Tocqueville - of at least seven centuries in the progress of European ideas. It is to my mind a pretty incoherent set of ideas: democracy and liberty at the same time - I don't think so.

Americans imagine on a daily basis that they are "free" in ways that other people are not while their state owns more land, controls more education and enforces more regulations than is the case with most other developed societies. And, worse than that, the pressures of social conformity have always been greater than in older forms of society; this seems to me to have been a constant theme of American writing from the earliest times to modern Hollywood: I just read, for example, Willa Cather's O Pioneers which is set in Nebraska between 1880 and 1910 and the relation between the newness of a society and its lack of tolerance of eccentricity is a major theme of the novel as of so much American writing.

Since America the idea and America the place operate at different metaphysical levels the tribulations of the latter hardly affect the former; American patriotism ignores the dismal facts about the American economy and American power.

You can scarcely enter a bookshop or newsagents or watch one of the more serious TV channels without being aware that somebody is saying that the American Century is over. It has dawned that "globalisation" was never really an American game with Starbuck's and McDonald's as its significant players and only the most superficial of observers could have thought it so. The USA is just not global enough to win the globalisation game: Indian tycoons and English games and Russian oligarchs and the commercial vestiges of the British Empire are all far more suited to the task.

I don't agree with the majority of Americans that the country is headed in the wrong direction. I travelled thousands of miles around America in bicentennial year - 1976 - and I also read a good deal about the centennial year,1876. In the earlier of the two periods the chattering classes were convinced that American values could not survive the greed, corruption and ethnic-demographic change which was taking place - much as Michael Moore and others are convinced now.

This year, a third of a century after the bicentennial, we zig-zagged from New York to Chicago, then down to Lexington and the Cumberland Gap and west to Texas and it seemed to me that America was a better country than it used to be. The big cities are cleaner, safer, more cosmopolitan and more interesting places than they used to be. Above all, the country does not crackle with the racial tension and contempt which used to be its worst feature in 1976. That story is far from over, but it is a story of progress in the best sense.

America is not the greatest nation on earth: there isn't one. Like most places, it is good in parts. The National Parks are superb, but the waste of energy is appalling; the meat is excellent, but the bread is mostly terrible stuff; the musical heritage is a gift to the world, but much of the town planning should not be imitated at any price. I try to stifle my irritation at America the idea and retain my affection for America the place.

Lincoln Allison retired from an academic career at the University of Warwick in 2004 - and again in 2008 - to become a freelance writer and broadcaster. He remains Emeritus Reader in Politics at the University of Warwick and Visiting Professor in sport and leisure at the University of Brighton. His latest book is The Disrespect Agenda: Or How the Wrong Kind of Niceness Is Making Us Weak and Unhappy.

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Culture: Clive James on Denis Healey; Rick Jones on WG Sebald; Nick Cohen reviews Simon Schama's The American Future; Conrad Black assesses the relationship between Americans and the British monarchy; Ian Bostridge celebrates Schubert's last songs, plus a short story by Carlo Gébler.

Economy: Internationally renowned commentators Sir Samuel Brittan and Edward Hadas debate the moral questions raised by the current financial turmoil, and Tim Congdon blames "super-banks" for our economic woes.

Modern Life: Alain de Botton has plans to reinvigorate the art of conversation; Jonathan Foreman reports from New York as the Dow collapses, and Anthony Daniels is saddened by the death of traditional gravestones.

Science: Mark Ronan wants to stop "new maths" being taught in schools, and thinks every pupil should learn from Euclid, the neglected father of geometry.

Plus: Nick Cohen, Minette Marrin, Sarah Vine, Roger Kimball and many more.