Richard Williams is not impressed by the decision to appoint a new England manager with such indecent haste.

Capello is one of the great club coaches and his brusque intelligence may just be what this generation of England players need. If England are going to employ another foreigner, he is as good as they come. But did the FA really need to seize the time quite so urgently?

Here was the opportunity to recognise the failure to reach next summer’s Euro 2008 finals as a real blessing, albeit in very heavy disguise. A period without competitive fixtures could have been used for rigorous consideration of the factors that have led the England team to such a pass, in particular the terrible paucity of plausible English candidates for McClaren’s job. This is the major fault-line running through the foundations of the English game, and the FA would have done well to acknowledge it by avoiding the temptation to make an instant high-profile appointment, announcing instead its intention to search for a radical solution…

I am chronically uninterested in sport, but I love intelligent writing. Which is why I read Richard Williams.

Vivid account by Bridget O’Donnell, a mother who happened to be on holiday in Portugal in the same group as the McCann family when their daughter was abducted.

We lay by the members-only pool staring at the sky. Round and round, the helicopters clacked and roared. Their cameras pointed down at us, mocking the walled and gated enclave. Circles rippled out across the pool. It was the morning after Madeleine went.

Six days earlier we had landed at Faro airport. The coach was full of people like us, parents lugging multiple toddler/baby combinations. All of us had risen at dawn, rushed along motorways and hurtled across the sky in search of the modern solution to our exhaustion – the Mark Warner kiddie club. I travelled with my partner Jes, our three-year-old daughter, and our nine-month-old baby son. Praia da Luz was the nearest Mark Warner beach resort and this was the cheapest week of the year – a bargain bucket trip, for a brief lie-down…

It’s a very good piece, which makes no attempt to exploit the experience. And she donated her fee to the Find Madeleine fund.

Geoffrey Wheatcroft, in splendid form on a subject dear to my own, er, head.

Whatever the socio-economic explanation, men did once wear hats, and now they don’t. As it happens, I am one of the exceptions. I always wear a hat of one sort or another. Men who wear hats (I’m not sure about women) are widely supposed to be making a statement, as it’s called, perhaps of a politically reactionary kind. My late friend Richard Cobb, the great Oxford historian of France, pointed out that there, before the war, the choice of headgear was full of political significance, but that was when everyone still wore a hat, and your statement was left or right, whether proletarian casquette (cloth cap), or Basque beret. Since I know unimpeachable men of the left who still wear hats, this may, like many things, be a matter of temperament rather than ideology.

In any case, there’s something much stranger about this terror of titfers, in utilitarian rather than symbolic terms. Hats aren’t there merely for show, they serve a vital purpose, which one might think too obvious to point out: to keep the head warm and dry. Wearing a silk hat to Royal Ascot is probably affectation, and wearing a panama with a club ribbon is childish, but not wearing a hat at all in the British winter is insane. I’ve tried at length to explain to my son that four-fifths of body heat escapes through the head but, like anyone of his age, he thinks hats – apart maybe from hoodies’ hoods and back-to-front baseball caps – are terminally uncool.

Er, quite.

Hooray! Neil Turok is a winner of the 2008 TED Prize.

An excerpt from Doris Lessing’s acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize for Literature.

The next day I am to give a talk at a school in North London, a very good school. It is a school for boys, with beautiful buildings and gardens. The children here have a visit from some well-known person every week: these may be fathers, relatives, even mothers of the pupils; a visit from a celebrity is not unusual for them.

As I talk to them, the school in the blowing dust of north-west Zimbabwe is in my mind, and I look at the mildly expectant English faces in front of me and try to tell them about what I have seen in the last week. Classrooms without books, without textbooks, or an atlas, or even a map pinned to a wall. A school where the teachers beg to be sent books to tell them how to teach, they being only 18 or 19 themselves. I tell these English boys how everybody begs for books: “Please send us books.” But there are no images in their minds to match what I am telling them: of a school standing in dust clouds, where water is short, and where the end-of-term treat is a just-killed goat cooked in a great pot.

Is it really so impossible for these privileged students to imagine such bare poverty?

I do my best. They are polite.

I’m sure that some of them will one day win prizes.

Then the talk is over. Afterwards I ask the teachers how the library is, and if the pupils read. In this privileged school, I hear what I always hear when I go to such schools and even universities. “You know how it is,” one of the teachers says. “A lot of the boys have never read at all, and the library is only half used.”

Yes, indeed we do know how it is. All of us.

We are in a fragmenting culture, where our certainties of even a few decades ago are questioned and where it is common for young men and women, who have had years of education, to know nothing of the world, to have read nothing, knowing only some speciality or other, for instance, computers.

What has happened to us is an amazing invention – computers and the internet and TV. It is a revolution. This is not the first revolution the human race has dealt with. The printing revolution, which did not take place in a matter of a few decades, but took much longer, transformed our minds and ways of thinking. A foolhardy lot, we accepted it all, as we always do, never asked: “What is going to happen to us now, with this invention of print?” In the same way, we never thought to ask, “How will our lives, our way of thinking, be changed by the internet, which has seduced a whole generation with its inanities so that even quite reasonable people will confess that, once they are hooked, it is hard to cut free, and they may find a whole day has passed in blogging etc?”

From Bronner’s Christmas Wonderland…

Download our exclusive 3¼” by 4½” laptop computer glass ornament to your tree for high-tech festive fun! Artfully crafted from glass, shimmering glitter accents add an irresistible appeal that will never be outdated. Comes ready to hang with a silver cord.

I expect it runs Windows XP.

Thanks to Bill Thompson for the link.