Who are the world’s 100 leading public intellectuals? Woundingly, I do not appear on the list compiled by “Prospect” and “Foreign Policy” magazines. But at least I sit along the corridor from one of these great brains: Martin Wolf is on the list.

Prospect are now inviting readers to vote for a top five. In the interests of self-aggrandisement by association, I have decided only to vote for colleagues or former colleagues - so my five votes go to Martin, Niall Ferguson (FT columnist), Larry Summers (ditto), Christopher Hitchens (Sunday Correspondent) and Anne Applebaum (The Economist). This seems an appropriately infantile response to an infantile exercise. And anything that stops Noam Chomsky from winning again has to be worthwhile.

I popped next door to congratulate/tease Martin about his eminence. And he made rather a good point. (One would expect no less, of course.) Today’s intellectuals are a rather unimpressive bunch compared to a similar list of “public intellectuals” you could have compiled in 1850. Martin reeled off the names of Marx, Mill and de Tocqueville. To which I would add - Dickens, Tolstoy, Darwin, Balzac.

All of the above were already well known by 1850 and I think they stack up pretty well when compared with Chomsky, Fukuyama, Kagan - or even, dare I say it, Martin Wolf.

So are we living in some sort of intellectual dark age? Or have Prospect and Foreign Policy simply overlooked the great minds of our era?

One of the disadvantages of having my e-mail address printed in the paper is that I get a lot of weird people communicating with me. (I am not referring to the honoured readers of this blog.)

Most of the offers of cheap Viagra are caught in the FT’s capacious spam-filter. But I seem to get an awful lot of people trying to interest me in dubious-sounding business propositions. Most of them I delete without a second thought. But I think this particular communication has an unusual panache to it.

EMERALDS, FOSSILS AND RUBIES: YOUR VERY BEST ACQUISITION AGAINST ECONOMICAL CRISIS
 
GOOD DAY ULTRA-AFFLUENT PARTNER, DEAREST BROTHER:
 

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Brace yourself for the wave of 1968 nostalgia that will hit us next month - the anniversary of the May events in Paris. All those soixante-huitards will be strutting their stuff in the papers. Who knows Le Monde may even consent to start publishing again?

Well I’m not a soixante-huitard - more like a soixante-dix huitard. And I’m pleased to see that we 1978ers are also getting our small moment of nostalgic glory. This weekend they are re-staging the famous (well, quite famous) “Rock Against Racism” concert that took place in Victoria Park in Hackney in 1978. There was a big article last weekend in the Observer about the original concert.

I finally managed to impress my daughter by informing her that I had been at the original concert back in 1978. She is 14 - the same age as I was in 1978 - and is planning to go to the re-union concert this weekend. (I have been forbidden from coming along, even though I would quite like to.)

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The British papers this week have been contemplating the death of Joan Hunter Dunn - who was the muse who inspired that most English of poets, John Betjeman.

But never mind Betjeman. I have just come across something that struck me as quintessentially English, on the website of the Cambridge University Philosophy department. It is the biography of one of the members of the faculty, John Marenbon. The full version is here. But let me just highlight the first paragraph and a half: (more…)

I usually think that one of the more charming British characteristics is the national tendency to self-deprecation and under-statement. Let the Americans preen about "sole superpowers"; let the French natter about "l’exception Francaise" - the British just get on with it. But there is an important qualification to this rule. Every now and then the British fall prey to a bout of national self-congratulation. When that happens - take cover. It is usually a sign of impending catastrophe.

There are three recent examples of bouts of national hubris - followed by a swift come-uppance. First - and most immediately - there was the self-congratulation about how well we were handling the global financial crisis. Second, there was the pride over how much better the British army was at policing Iraq than the Americans. Finally, there was the period when it was conventional wisdom that the British model of integration was infinitely superior to that of the French.

Take the financial crisis first. Only last week, the spin coming out of the Bank of England was that the European Central Bank and the Federal Reserve had over-reacted. The bank, with its centuries of experience, understood the risks of "moral hazard". A week later - and the ECB and the Fed are looking comparatively good. It is Britain that has had the bank run and the embarrassing policy reversals.

It is all curiously reminiscent of Britain’s bout of self-congratulation, just after the occupation of Iraq.

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