I am dismayed by the RSA's change of institutional Schwerpunkt from hardnosed concern with education and training for personal and national capabilit… - Correlli Barnett

In May 1956...a working party of officials submitted a report on "German Competition with particular reference to the Engineering Industries". It made grim reading. Between 1953 and 1954 German exports rose by 40 per cent in volume and her share of world trade in manufactures rose from 13.3 per cent to 15.6 per cent, whereas Britain's share fell from 25.5 per cent to 19.8 per cent. In those same years output per man in manufacturing "improved almost twice as much in Germany as in the United Kingdom".

As I can remember, as a schoolboy in south London, there was no dismay among my family and their friends at the sight of contorted vapour trails high over us as Fighter Command and the Luftwaffe fought it out in the blue summer sky – only a sense of excitement. Looking back now as a historian, it is clear to me that in 1940 the British nation was blessed by an inner certainty that, just as the Navy had seen off Philip II of Spain in 1588 and Napoleon in 1805, so now the Royal Air Force and the Navy together would see off that funny little man with the toothbrush moustache and his fat chum in the gawdy uniform covered in medals. In that certainty, there was truly an element of the heroic.

[A]s Marx, Engels, Lenin and Mao perceived, the basic concept of war as a continuation of politics by other means can be applied to any form of rivalry between human groups, be they class, racial or ideological. In these contexts "war", or the use of force to compel an opponent to fulfil one's will, has far broader meanings than a traditional punch-up between nation states or alliances, or the kind of "absolute" or "total" war which Clausewitz saw as conceptually the purest form and which we have witnessed twice this century. Thus we saw anti-nuclear protesters employ force at military installations in pursuit of the political aim of persuading Western governments into unilateral nuclear disarmament. We saw Greenpeace employ force against Shell plc over the disposal of the Brent Spar platform. We saw Arthur Scargill's troops attempt by coercion to bring down an elected government, only to be defeated in, quite literally, pitched battles. We may note in these encounters and, for that matter, in the street brawls during the World Cup, another fundamental factor that is unlikely to change in the future – the dark well of aggressiveness that lies within human nature and finds release in the pleasurable adrenalin surge that comes from violence, risk and danger.