Our moral authority is as important if not more important than our troop strength or our high-tech weapons. We are rapidly losing that moral authority not only in the Arab world but all over the world.

In emerging democracies like Russia in authoritarian states like Iran or even Yugoslavia journalists play a vital role in civil society. In fact they form the very basis of those new democracies and civil societies.

The response of anybody interested in liberty is that we all have a say and the ability to have an argument is exactly what liberty is even though it may never be resolved. In any authoritarian society the possessor of power dictates and if you try and step outside he will come after you.

The society of dead authors has this advantage over that of the living: they never flatter us to our faces nor slander us behind our backs nor intrude upon our privacy nor quit their shelves until we take them down.

There's no doubt that scientific training helps many authors to write better science fiction. And yet several of the very best were English majors who could not parse a differential equation to save their lives.

Now Venus is an extremely hostile environment and as such presents a lot of challenges for a science fiction author who wants to create life there. However as I began to research it more thoroughly I found myself intrigued by the possibilities the world offers.

That science has long been neglected and declining in England is not an opinion originating with me but is shared by many and has been expressed by higher authority than mine.

Since Hiroshima and the Holocaust science no longer holds its pristine place as the highest moral authority. Instead that role is taken by human rights. It follows that any assault on Jewish life - on Jews or Judaism or the Jewish state - must be cast in the language of human rights.

In the post-enlightenment Europe of the 19th century the highest authority was no longer the Church. Instead it was science. Thus was born racial anti-Semitism based on two disciplines regarded as science in their day - the 'scientific study of race' and the Social Darwinism of Herbert Spencer and Ernst Haeckel.

In questions of science the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual.