If someone described to you an ancient civilization in which, every four years, at great expense, citizens convened to watch a carefully selected group perform a series of meticulously preset routines, and in which the watching was thought of not as a duty but as a hugely anticipated and unambiguously pleasurable experience, you would guess that, socially, this ritual was doing a lot of work.

NEWYORKER: Glory Days

Mr Straw restated his aim of creating 14, 000 more prison places by 2014, saying the government would be "failing in its fundamental duty to protect the public" if it did not increase capacity to meet the anticipated pressure on the system.

BBC: Jail reformers 'forget victims'