Ms Rice acknowledges that she failed to alert Mr Bush to some of the dubious intelligence

Ms Rice acknowledges that she failed to alert Mr Bush to some of the dubious intelligence used to justify the war But her mea culpa was received with restraint by the press. Likewise Colin Powell has never been put on the rack for his performance before the UN. They are thriving because they are flexible thinkers and can sense the changed public mood in America.All of this is far from the triumphant mood of just a few months back when George Bush strutted on the deck of an aircraft carrier and claimed victory. The pride of that moment has been replaced by something close to humility. The left has too often traded in cartoon stereotypes of the United States and failed to understand the fundamental dynamic of American political life: the US is a country of moderates, not liberal but basically tolerant The terrorism of 11 September has not altered that.

It created a back-draught of anger and set America on a course for war in Afghanistan and Iraq. But the basic common sense of the American mainstream never went away That is good news for America and the world. It is what the events of the past week have been all about.The writer is a BBC Special Correspondent. Buttocks today know nothing about real discomfort, least of all in contemporary Oxford Look, these benches are covered in foam-filled cushioning We never had upholstery in my day in the Sheldonian. We sat on hard, shiny, post-puritan boards polished by 400 years of every kind of buttock. And remember, the buttocks that had originally slid across these boards had been flogged so frequently they could stand up to anything, even sitting down.

It was one of Christopher Wren’s first projects and never designed for plays but for university ceremonies such as degree giving and matriculation.Ceremonies had taken place in church but they came to feature music and a satirical speech from a renaissance sketchwriter-cum-gossip columnist called Terrae Filius. You couldn’t behave like that on hallowed ground, not in those days. So Gilbert Sheldon asked Christopher Wren for a secular building to accommodate the revels.But a problem has developed over the past 500 years: we’re all so much bigger than we were (I am, if you’re not), and the benches are no more than a foot deep. It wouldn’t worry me, but it might irritate the person in front, to sit through an evening of Baroque music, my foot in their lap.But even if the seating arrangements are a bit neo-Classical some of us prefer them to Haut Gaumont. It’s one of Britain’s most glorious auditoria for early English music, and the best acoustics you could hope for (particularly when it’s empty). And its current administrator, chairman Jeffrey Hackney, has rather brilliantly added almost invisible seatbacks to many of the seats.

There may be further developments in the next 500 years, if the criticism continues
More from Simon Carr. There’s a shop I seem to keep passing at the moment. No matter where I’m going or what manner of transport I am using, there it always is, somewhere between X and Y, a constant irritation to my senses, not because I don’t like the shop and what it sells, but because I do. I am not going to describe its location exactly, partly for the reason that I am not certain myself, and partly for the reason that I don’t want other people to know of its existence Once everybody knows, it will have lost its allure. Enough that it’s in London, in the vicinity of New Bond Street

There’s a shop I seem to keep passing at the moment. A gentlemen’s outfitters, as such were once called – though, of course, no man now thinks of himself as a gentleman nor goes along with the concept of being fitted out – expensively Mediterranean, of the sort always named after a famous Italian composer, Puccini, Verdi, Mascagni, Monteverdi, Donizetti, Morricone, though you suspect the owner, like the majority of his clients, is actually from the Levant.The clothes, meanwhile, whoever buys and sells them, are definitely Italian Southern Italian is how I think of them From Naples or Bari or Taranto Or maybe even more southern still – Sicily, say Mafia clothes, that’s what I’m saying Clothes to meet other members of the Mob in.

He wore a treble-breasted grey silk suit, shot through with filaments of platinum, and the softest of soft white shirts, with long pointed collars and cuffs lined with swansdown. I admired the way he sat at the head of the table dispensing favours, buying the most expensive Armagnacs, choosing cigars for everyone, including the women, and permitting, with a slow inclination of the head, those who wanted to get up and dance to do so He was, of course, above dancing himself. Personal dancing is not what you do if you’re Mafia.The other thing I liked about him was the way he kept smiling at me. I hanker to dress like a Sicilian-born Mobster.I sat next to someone from the Mafia once, in a swing club in New York. He was tall for an Italian, with a long pale face and beautifully tapered fingers. Which is presumably why I am drawn to the place, why I keep seeing it from the top of a bus, or from the window of a speeding taxi, or out of the corner of my eye when I am running to get to the chemist before it closes There is a part of me that is forever Cosa Nostra Nothing to do with violence or extortion I wouldn’t hurt or take money from a fly It’s an aesthetic thing, that’s all It’s about dressing. He does not believe in remaking the world in America’s image.