Howard Jacobson could only have produced his attack on anti-Zionism in The Finkler Question as a book. I don't mean that as a novelist he was highly unlikely to write it as anything else, but that the book trade provides the last, best refuge for original and uncomfortable debates in Britain.

I have a piece in the Observer about the lamentable manner in which University College, London reacted to the discovery that one of his graduates had turned into a potential mass murderer.

A few months ago, I sat in a magnificent Victorian lecture hall at University College London. It was once one of finest centres of intellectual inquiry in Europe, thanks to the efforts of its founder, the sternly anti-clerical philosopher Jeremy Bentham. It did not take me long to realise that fear of clerical fascism had led Bentham's trembling successors to abandon intellectual inquiry and basic intellectual standards along with it.

I've a review in the Australian of Tony Blair's autobiography. I look at how mainstream British society is now going along with conspiracy theories from the far left and far right so thoroughly that it is hard to tell them apart.

I've a piece in the Observer about the shocking treatment of Paul Chambers. To summarise, the 27-year-old worked for a car parts company in Yorkshire. He and a woman from Northern Ireland started to follow each other on Twitter. He liked her tweets and she liked his and boy met girl in a London pub. They got on as well in person as they did in cyberspace. To the delight of their followers, Paul announced he would be flying from Robin Hood airport in Doncaster to Northern Ireland to meet her for a date.

Next year's referendum on the alternative vote is meant to be the pivot on which the coalition government will swivel. The thinking runs that if the Liberals lose then they have no reason to continue their cohabitation with the Tories and Labour is back in the game. I doubt this and suspect that if public spending cuts push us back into recession, mass unemployment and penury will bring Labour back. ( And conversely, if the Conservatives and Liberals manage to build a prosperous society, then their future is assured.)

   The great Bryan Appleyard, surely the most underrated journalist in Britain, has picked up on this Guardian survey of leading Labour thinkers. "Whither the left?" it cried. And the answers were a tad bathetic.

It Shouldn't Happen to Yvette.

Indolence characterises the Labour leadership campaign. Well-meaning people wring their hands and say that the high bar potential candidates must leap before they can put themselves before the party should be lowered so that every possible shade of opinion is represented. For this reason, Labour politicians who think that Diane Abbot is a self-aggrandising boor, nevertheless nominate her so that she can take part in a contest that will wind through the summer months like a sluggish river meandering to the sea.

As far as I can see, only the Independent has reviewed Pascal Bruckner's Tyranny of Guilt a history of Western Masochism. The is both a shame and shameful, because even if you disagree with his argument that European culture has sunk into a cowardly and selfish isolationism, you ought to take it on.

Here's my take on him for the Australian Literary Review