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Note: This is the second post in a five part series. Please see Part 1 for the introduction. Stemming from the Editor are the people who fill the pages with wit and wisdom. British GQ boasts Simon Kelner, Matthew d’Ancona, Will Self, AA Gill, Tony Parsons, Jeremy Clarkson, Naomi Campbell, Martin

It was the critics who are universally blamed for the original fate of The Birthday Party, when - after a couple of encouraging regional dates in Cambridge, then Oxford - it came to what was then the Lyric Opera House in Hammersmith on May 19, 1958, and abruptly closed just eight performances later after a run of only a week.

I went to an awesome talk tonight at the RSA - unfortunately I didn’t take a notebook so I’m gonna have to riff on what people said a little - it was called ‘Question Time on sustainable design and development’ and was hosted by Griff Ryhs Jones who was as smart as he was funny - in fact the whole evening was both insightful and hilarious.

Rod Liddle* wiped the floor with the rest of them, altho' rather bizarrely I found myself agreeing with Clare Short MP (Independent, Birmingham Ladywood) every now and then**. Little Sarah Teather MP (Lib Dem, Brent) still has the cutest hamster-face planted on the smallest head/neck in the House of Commons, and as ever turned up with a smart jacket slung straight over her underwear.

"It's difficult to imagine a year more ludicrous, or more damaging to the country, in the long term, than 1968. A year chock full of deluded teenagers, of fatuous slogans, of bombs and sit-ins and bad music and worse films. A year when everything the country believed in was turned on its head by extremely ill-kempt people who perhaps went a long time between baths.