Through the many films he made for television Betjeman reached the hearts and minds of millions more who might never read a poem but who felt that they knew him and shared in his delights. Philip Larkin praised him for restoring “direct intelligible communication to poetry”. the effect is simply monumental.” August Rodin: Erotic Drawings, with 107 colour illustrations, is published by Thames and Hudson (pounds 48).. JOHN BETJEMAN occupies a unique position in the British psyche, a comforting dreamland of fire-lit nurseries, teddies and tea, suburban gardens, country stations, seaside holidays and golf. He presented himself as the common man of middle England, middle-aged, middle class, yet not so much vox populi as vox humana. Outlines drawn with a couple of pencil lines, flesh colour set down in watercolour with a full brush …

Often he cut up images and superimposed them, as in this one, “Female Couple” Paul Klee called them “nude caricatures .. amazingly brilliant. Encouraging his models to move, relax and forget him, he sketched rapidly, without looking at the paper, dropping the finished work on the floor. August Rodin made sketches throughout his life but in his last two decades turned to erotic studies of the female nude. It may seem curious to tax a book this long with sins of omission, but it signally fails to be helpful.

If we need trust, how do we get it back when we lose it? This is a question which might have led to some interesting and useful answers, but, like a fat man trying to get a glimpse of his shoes, Fukuyama was unable to see it.. If the real obstacles to economic success are not institutionalised racism but lack of trust, and if lack of trust is a centuries-old heritage of slavery, then teenage blacks might as well get on with selling crack to each other.Fukuyama’s celebration of the convivial virtues turns a particularly cheerless visage towards those languishing beyond the bright circle of trust. Black entrepreneurship, therefore, is stifled by the collapse of solidarity within their own community, not by the prejudice of white bankers and white consumers. By contrast, Korean, Chinese and Pakistani shop-owners are able to rise out of poverty because they can count on their families to work long hours, rely on their own ethnic group to patronise their shops and be certain of loans, favours and services from their own people.The implications will not delight inner-city blacks. It is a pre-capitalist inheritance which modern society lives on and, mostly, squanders.