News about Tom Lehrer

The modern world has lots of ways of showing that you care, with maximum publicity. If you want to build a catwalk for your conscience to strut along, the cameras will quickly arrive to film you. Almost none of these routes to public admiration, or to self-admiration, involve hard work, true sacrifice or real consideration for others. Rather the contrary. The more that such people shout about their righteousness, the more I suspect that at home there is an unmade bed in a room like a landfill site and despairing housemates exasperated by the piles of unwashed plates and empty beer cans. And I think there is proof of this in the nasty, slatternly mess that Gaza protesters have left behind them in Oxford this week.

PETER HITCHENS: When I look at the results of the sexual revolution so far, it seems that it would have been a charter for miserable, selfish men. It demolished the old belief that a man who fathered a child was responsible for the child and its mother. Men of my generation were also taught a stifling Christian moral code, which would surprise most people under the age of 40 if they encountered it today. Marriage was meant to last. Sex was a private matter. In any case, women had to be respected - such behaviour and words were obviously unthinkable in their presence. And this was a rule in pit villages that was just as well respected as it was in the comfortable suburbs as well. (Image: feminist author Nina Power)