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From the page: "It was a good school, a grammar school, and the kids were well-mannered, bright, self-confident. They were all bound for university, and since we were talking about poetry, I asked them casually how many poems they knew by heart. There was a silence. I looked again at the 30 sixth-formers. "What, none?" I said. I couldn't believe it. Here was the cream of young England, exposed by their teachers to all that is best in our literature, and not so much as a sonnet had lodged in their skulls.

I am afraid I was filled with rage, despair, and a desire to do something about it. My teachers probably spent more time in Japanese POW camps than they did at teacher-training college, and yet they had one utensil of instruction for which I will always be grateful. They made us learn stuff, and spout it out, and we blushed if we got it wrong; and the result is that I am a kind of slightly wonky poetry jukebox. There must be thousands of texts in there: snatches, fragments and large numbers of whole poems. I could do you a dozen Shakespeare sonnets, the whole of Lycidas (186 lines of the thing) and the first 100 lines of the Iliad in Greek.

As anyone who loves poetry will testify, when you learn a good poem, you make a good friend. You have a voice that will pop up in your head, whenever you want it, and say something beautiful and consoling and true. A poem can keep you going when you are driving on a lonely motorway, or when you are trapped on some freezing ledge in the Alps, or when you are engaged in any kind of arduous and repetitive physical activity, and need to keep concentration. When some disaster overwhelms you, or when you are feeling unusually cheerful - or when you are experiencing any human feeling whatever - it is amazing how often some line or phrase will swim to the surface and help to articulate your emotions, to intensify them or to console.

That is why it is so sad that children are no longer learning poetry off by heart, and doubly sad because poetry is the one art form in which the English are unsurpassed. The Germans beat us at classical music. The Americans invented rock and roll. I am afraid that the Italians, the French, the Dutch and the Spanish can all boast a more illustrious roll-call of top painters, and the Russians have produced the greatest novels. But no other nation has ever produced so much high-quality poetry - mainly, I think, because of the language itself.

With half a million words (more than double either French or German), and being an extraordinary confluence of Romance and Teutonic streams, English is uniquely rich in metrical possibilities, in puns, and above all in rhyme. It is the ingenious rhyming and the scanning that makes the poetry stick in the mind, and the tragedy is that these disciplines have been dismissed, over the past few decades, as a bourgeois irrelevance. Children are no longer asked to write stuff that rhymes or scans, and even if they were they would find it tricky, since they no longer have the stock of metrical forms in their heads; and if a representative sample of intelligent 17-year-olds no longer has a single poem to recite, then the greatest talent of the British people is in danger."

From the page: ""Sugar was the old devil, and high-fructose corn syrup is the new devil," said Marcia Mogelonsky, a senior analyst at Mintel International, a market-research company."

It's about time!

From the page: "Researcher seeks repair for brain injuries, while colleagues explore other health benefits of stem cell bio-technology."

From the page: "It's not only blue-collar workers who are feeling the greatest anguish. Americans who are trapped in houses worth less than their mortgages are suffering. So, too, are people whose personal wealth is tied to the stock market. Personal wealth is dwindling in the U.S., and the effects of the financial meltdown have been felt around the world.

"This recession is broader, deeper and more complicated than virtually anything we have ever seen," Wachovia Corp. (WB) economist Mark Vitner said. "The whole evolution of the credit markets resulted in all sorts of complex financial instruments that are difficult to unwind. It's like trying to unscramble scrambled eggs. It just can't be done that easily. I don't know if it can be done at all."

He said he sees fear in the eyes of his clients.

"I've had people come up and hug me after a presentation, which is unusual," he said. "I haven't told them anything about how it's going to be better, but they just feel better having a better understanding of what's happening.""

From the page: "In the more overheated renditions of the Brown theme, there is talk of a "global vision for fairness", in which the very poverty that is being visited upon all the developed economies will somehow make it possible to redistribute wealth to the developing world.

Is he quite mad? Does he actually believe that the economic failure of rich countries will do anything but impoverish poor countries even further? Or that the moral righteousness of the intention to cure world poverty will, in itself, constitute some kind of cure for the banking collapse?

Meanwhile, Mr Obama--who gives the impression of being considerably out of his depth in the economic maelstrom--talks of an "opportunity"(emphasis added) to "reorganise our priorities". He gave a major speech last week in which he actually seemed to suggest that the present crisis had been caused by America's failure to develop a universal health care system and to attend to the impending environmental disaster of global warming ("we made the wrong choices"), and that by focusing on these matters a way can be found out of the country's economic problems.

Is he quite mad? Does he really believe that the banking crisis and the recession were some kind of divine retribution for the absence of universal health care, and excessive carbon emissions? Or is he suggesting that a practical solution lies in spending money on health care and the development of alternative energy sources?

If it is the latter, then he is making a pitch for old-fashioned Roosevelt-style government-expenditure programmes which take money out of the productive part of the economy and bring state intervention into play in new dimensions of national life. It did not work for Roosevelt and it will not work now."