How can we in Britain learn to live together more successfully? We should cultivate an "encounter culture," in which it becomes easier to interact with others. This may require compulsory community service for young people

Digital technology hands more power and convenience to the individual consumer. But technologies of connectivity can threaten stability and community. We need a new ethics of inconvenience

The Conservative party has traditionally combined two great principles—personal freedom and public service. It now needs a new idea of community

Tony Blair's "respect" policies reflect public disquiet and anxiety among policymakers about declining trust and social capital. The task of moral renewal must not end with the fading of traditional institutions

Paul Seabright has written a stimulating book about the origins of liberalism. But it will not help us rethink our relations with non-liberals at home or abroad, and he does not grasp the nature of authority

Beaches are giant blank spaces, washed clean every day, on to which all sorts of hopes are projected. But they do not transcend politics?in fact, they represent a third way between market and state

"Social capital" explains less than its proponents think

It is a myth that death has replaced sex as our big taboo. Death is easy to talk about. What is hard is to give it modern architectural form. Our cemeteries express a wider loss of faith in civic culture

London is the sickness. Is the cure to get government out and create a new capital?

Britain's biggest cities enjoyed a revival in the 1990s but people with money and choice continue fleeing to the suburbs and beyond

Segregation along class, racial or religious lines is inevitable and will happen even in tolerant, liberal societies like Britain.

Who gives a **** about good manners? Once it was liberating to loosen the British upper lip. Now incivility is so rampant it's an issue of social policy, this may be the price of a wealthier, more dynamic nation