Textbooks are no longer given to schoolchildren; they're too expensive. So they're given to the teachers, who probably need them more.

People who are given whatever they want soon develop a sense of entitlement and rapidly lose their sense of proportion.

Pop music provides not just the soundtrack to our lives, as the cliche goes; it releases our emotions and helps us to articulate them. This is why music is so important to adolescents, who are struggling with questions of identity and self-expression.

Music - not just the lyrics, but the music itself - expresses confused or illicit passions: rage, lust, envy, frustration, channeling these energies and creating an outlet for them.

Top-up fees mean that universities are increasingly under pressure to confer degrees upon students, who perceive the degree as a commodity they've purchased. Failure doesn't enter into anyone's calculations.

If history starts as a guest list, it has a tendency to end like the memory of a drunken party: misheard, blurred, fragmentary.