A Point of View

Sara Wheeler reflects that the attack on Ukraine is not the war of the Russian people she has known. "The calamitous news eroding any remote sense we might have nurtured of peace in our time is, we now know, not going to cease any time soon. Yet while the image of a villainous Russia dominates the news agenda, I remember Russians I have met over the years on my travels in their land. This is not their war." Producer: Sheila Cook Production Coordinator: Gemma Ashman Sound: Peter Bosher Editor: Penny Murphy

John Connell reflects on planting trees on his family farm in Ireland as reparation for the years he has spent flying round the world, and also as an intrinsic good. "For so many the planting of the tree for nature itself, not for politics, or development or climate change or remembrance of some brutal war but for the contribution of life is never thought of....We do not measure success in knowing the way of the earth because for the most part, the greater part of society is cut off from the political act of growing something to produce oxygen and sequester carbon."Producer: Sheila Cook Sound: Peter Bosher Production Coordinator: Gemma Ashman Editor: Hugh Levinson

Sara Wheeler reflects on the harm done by seeing the world only from our own point of view."At the heart of both day-to-day thoughtlessness and internecine slaughter lies a failure to see things through the eyes of another. If we all tried to see clearly rather than selectively - well, you know, I think the planet would get on quite a lot better." Producer: Sheila Cook Sound: Peter Bosher Production Coordinator: Gemma Ashman Editor: Penny Murphy

Will Self deplores the British attitude to children, seeing a mix of sentimentality and cruelty, and a culture which for decades allowed child sex abuse to hide "in plain view". "I'd argue that under cover of a positively Dickensian level of sentimentality that sees every child as a Tiny Tim, our cruelty and disdain for actual children continues to hold sway....The nauseating oscillation between outrage at the news of another child murdered by its parents or carers, often as a result of poverty and its drunken, drugged abusive sequels; and the prosecution of some benighted young soul for this or that 'crime' - in almost all cases actions themselves determined by exactly the same kinds of deprivation - has been a constant in my life...And then came the pandemic and its associated social measures - and exposed once more the fundamental British misopedia... A pervasive addiction to screen based work, entertainment and now education marches in lock-step with a view of children not as vitally distinct - and so necessarily in need of nurturance - but merely as little adults in waiting with all the troubling appetites that this implies." Sound: Peter Bosher Production Coordinator: Gemma Ashman Producer: Sheila Cook

As she leaves academia, Rebecca Stott says an audit culture is stifling universities. "Once universities had been turned into businesses and forced to compete with each other for students and fees, scores and league tables followed. And now we are assessed and monitored all the time too. It has eroded trust....When a seminar works you can feel the electricity crackle...You can't bottle this or record it or give it a score or sell it because it happens in the moment and in the room. " Sound Engineer :Peter Bosher Production Coordinator: Gemma Ashman Producer: Sheila Cook

Sarah Dunant asks if we should judge the past by the standards of the present or future, as shifting social attitudes colour our view of how the past is portrayed."What current historians share with those historians of the past whose vision we vehemently decry, is that they too thought they were right at the time...If we now find their views abhorrent and unjust then how about us; what might there be about our present moral certainty that the future might take issue with. What might we be missing?" Producer: Sheila Cook Sound: Peter Bosher Production Coordinator: Gemma Ashman

David Goodhart rejects what he calls the 'Eton conspiracy myth' of a cabal of his old school's alumni at the top of politics and welcomes its declining influence as a sign of growing equality."The Eton obsession not only overlooks progress made in slowly detaching our elite institutions from privilege, it also distracts from a hard-headed discussion about what we want from our elite."Producer: Sheila Cook

Zoe Strimpel reflects on the impact of rapid home delivery on the way we live our lives, and asks what our human experience might lose from this democratisation of laziness."A whole generation is about to come of age experiencing goods and service as simply things you can have delivered to your doorstep, fast. Will their brains cease to distinguish between different types of desire and demand?...Will they lose the capacity to form plans and commit to them, plans as minor as what to cook later that night?"Producer: Sheila Cook

Adam Gopnik on why a visit to get his phone repaired resulted in an unlikely revelation. Watching those waiting alongside him, Adam comes to the realisation that we have poured ourselves so completely into our phones that the devices, paradoxically, are the one place where we can picture ourselves as selves. They have become the equivalent of the confession booths of old, or the diary in the 18th century. "We all need some box to hold our fears and desires as the winds of the world threaten to blow us away," he concludes. Producer: Adele Armstrong

Howard Jacobson ponders why he's always associated Christmas with the sea. Strange, he reckons, given he's not exactly maritime by temperament. 'Long ago at Blackpool,' he writes, 'I was lifted onto a donkey and afterwards told to make a sandcastle, but I fell off the donkey and wilder boys in Brillo-pad swimming trunks trampled over my battlements'. He looks to Matthew Arnold for an explanation of this 'mysterious nexus of sea and Santa'. Producer: Adele Armstrong