Now, on three: “Puella, Puellam, Puellae…”

Ecce Romani Latin’s back. Ecce Romani Latin’s back. The best way of silencing the doubters would be if Mr Bush this time stands up to Mr Sharon.. He has still to dispel the suspicion that the proposed conference is little more than a device to shunt that tiresome little conflict into a diplomatic siding, clearing the main lines for an attack on Iraq.

Second, the US is now working in diplomatic concert with the UN, Europe and Russia, recognising that America cannot broker a settlement on its own.However Mr Bush has yet to prove his heart is truly in the enterprise. Rightly, Washington has concluded that the “final status” questions, most notably the shape of a viable Palestinian state, must be addressed up front, rather than deferred to the end of an incremental process. Suffice it to say that Jewish votes in – where else? – Florida could yet have an important bearing on his re-election in 2004.In the weeks since Mr Bush accepted he had no choice but to re-engage in the Middle East, there have been two significant new departures. A correspondent in our letters page yesterday complained that police horses shouldn’t have been used at all – not when water cannon could have been deployed instead.To return to the matter in hand, and to Club 18-30. The Metropolitan Police were not behaving stupidly when they appealed to the public’s disgust with the football riots last week, not by using images of injured cops, but by referring to the police horses that were crocked. It can only be a matter of time before a class action is launched by some enterprising lawyer, claiming compensation for diseases contracted, ova fertilised and young hearts broken.Even so, we certainly treat our animals better than our children And better than our police officers. Unlike the teenagers at Club 18-30, many of whom having been doing it for real and some of whom most definitely will have been hurt.

“No dogs,” they say, “were hurt and they weren’t doing it for real”. “Everything I was taught at school in the United States was painted as a pretty picture and was straightforward – but life is more complicated than that. Whether it’s the adventures of Captain Cook, the decay of the Appalachian Mountains or the plight of the Pilgrim Fathers, he takes a subject and scrutinises it from above, below, and underneath.”The world that I am writing about is completely different from the one I was taught about in school,” he said. He dubbed Liverpool a “festival of litter”, and said, “Bradford’s role in life is to make every place else look better by comparison.”"If I go to your home town and I didn’t have a good experience, people sometimes get upset about that – with some justification,” he said.What makes his work so brilliant is his ability to look at a country, person or a historical event from a completely different angle. His humorous and razor-sharp observations on the eccentricities of life in Britain (Notes From A Small Island), Australia (Notes From Down Under) and America (Notes From a Big Country and Made in America) have evoked laughter worldwide.At times he has left residents fuming.

Notes From A Small Island has sold almost a million copies and spent three years in The Sunday Times list of bestsellers. “It is such a great thing, the idea of a university that anyone can go to is such a utopian ideal that I think it is just wonderful.”But Bill Bryson deserves his honour for more than his glowing opinion of the OU. In 1986 he swooped on Container Corporation of America, giving the group a presence in South America and Europe.Michael Smurfit was a shining success in the Ireland of the 1980s, when unemployment was almost 20 per cent, drug problems abounded and the Northern Ireland nightmare was at its most bloody.The government asked him to turn around Ireland’s ailing state-owned phone company, Telecom Eireann He made the operation profitable. But his success turned sour when a controversial property deal for Telecom Eireann’s new headquarters resulted in the then prime minister, Charlie Haughey, suggesting that Mr Smurfit should step aside as chairman. The sacking was made all the worse as Mr Haughey made the comments on national radio while Mr Smurfit was enjoying a game of golf. Subsequently Mr Smurfit was cleared of any wrongdoing.Mr Smurfit crossed swords with the former prime minister again last year.