Society

How Francis Crick, discoverer of the structure of DNA, must be enjoying himself in the Underworld! He had so much in common with the early Greek philosophers. These thinkers, who were natural scientists rather than philosophers, debated what the world was made of and how it came to be as it was. They established some basic rules of scientific debate — that the world was rationally constructed and could therefore be understood by the use of reason and argument from hypotheses, and that supernatural explanations for the phenomena under discussion were not allowed. Crick would have thoroughly approved of all this, especially of the fact that some of these thinkers

Thirteen men of Asian appearance in their twenties and thirties were arrested by police investigating terrorism; the arrests were in north-west London; Bushey, Hertfordshire; Luton, Bedfordshire and Blackburn, Lancashire. Separate plans by al-Qa’eda terrorists to attack buildings in Britain were discovered after arrests in Pakistan, but the Home Office said no more than: ‘We are maintaining a state of heightened readiness.’ Mr David Blunkett, the Home Secretary, came up with the idea of a new law to force paedophiles to take lie-detector tests when asked if they had been in contact with children after being released from prison. Mr Mark Palios resigned as chief executive of the Football Association over

When Plato writes about education, he comes up with a brilliant image of the master-pupil relationship: ‘After a long partnership in a common life, truth flashes on the soul like a flame kindled by a leaping spark.’ The Labour and Tory education manifestos have very little to say about this ‘rather dodgy’ (© C. Clarke) concept. They think the answer to school problems is to play about with systems and structures. The Roman professor Quintilian (c. ad 90) is the first ancient to think seriously about how schools work. He insists that a good school depends as much on the character and psychological understanding of the teacher as on the