Life's A Picnic

Richard Dawkins, the naive professor

It's not a simple choice between God and evolution: none of us can know that there is nothing out there

Simple way to stop being uneducated

Despite our school system and culture, Britons show a healthy urge towards autodidacticism

We all need a bit of holiday spirit

At the start of a good break a switch is thrown in our heads: we believe that magic can happen

Lying to your children isn't a crime

The way the Darwins treated their sons may be cruel. But it doesn't deserve a harsher sentence

The Seventies with less good cheer

We have more debt and are less secure than we were the last time things got really tough

The Borisophobes are on the march (or not)

Boris Johnson is the latest figure to earn the ire of the right-thinking classes in our age of enmity. We need to move on

The shame of our lap-dancing universities

Overstretched and underfunded, they vie for media attention and academic standards fall

Lefties hug their children less. Don't they?

Whether we're left or right-wing, we use strong political beliefs to exonerate our own personal nastiness

That's right, punish working mothers again

I'd rather subsidise Caroline Spelman's childcare than pay for Barbara Follett's window-cleaning

We should be fighting on the infantry's side

General Sir Richard Dannatt's blast against soldiers' low pay is as much about culture as detail

People in grief or trauma must talk

Research suggests that stiff upper lips work best. We should realise by now that's rubbish

Fear, loathing and performance targets

Police now say tackling serious crime is more important than ticking boxes; about time

She's starving - but how's her IT?

While social services miss tragic cases, the Government fiddles with early learning targets

Are you a Toad?

Or a Ratty? A Mole perhaps? The classic Wind in the Willows, 100 years on, is one for today too

Muscled Madonna is an icon for chippy times

The fact is that the more angry, feral children there are on the streets, the more likely that some of them will be girls

Cherie Blair: enough to make you weep

Self-serving, smug, opportunistic, vain, shallow-thinking, nasty - memoirs are made of this

Deep breath... bawl out a rebel song

Giving free voice: we don't need a bossy list of what children should sing in schools