A more likely reason for immobility (” who’s the gentry - down our entry - all our streets got two TVs “) such as Young perceives might be the absurdly politicised, now widely acknowledged as disastrous, 1970s left wing educational policies (and drug culture) swamping much of Britain with two generations of virtually unemployable mutants (anywhere outside the media, that is) who demand taxpayers pay for them courtesy of the artfully ( in this post-Labour world, Labour politicians are the reactionaries - keeping the poor just that in order to justify their massive salaries )unreformed welfare state - and who can blame them ?

Ignatieff’s New Yorker mea culpa was very slippery based on the (avowedly anti-intellectual) premise that his errors in judgment had something to do with the mindset of academia versus the mindset of practical politics. The corollary being don’t worry it’s okay to listen to him now because now he’s a politician.

With the shattering of free market orthodoxy over the banking crisis there was the opportunity for someone to seize the moment as Fukuyama did in 1989, but no one’s come near.

But India is already leading Britain in one aspect.

Mr. Toby Young argues:”…Will the day come when the celebritariat endangers its own existence by becoming a self-perpetuating elite, closed off to new members? There are signs that this is beginning to happen, with the children of famous people inheriting their celebrity status, just as aristocrats inherited their parents estates…”

This has already happened in India.

Sons, daughters, wives and concubines of cricketers, film and TV personalities, politicians and businessmen make more than 50% of all “celebrities” in India.

William Leith is right in observing:”…And their (India’s) media is heading for ad-backed celebrity hell faster, and more comprehensively, than ours.”

1) Paul Krugman (won 2008 Nobel prize for Economics and regular columnist for op-ed pages of New York Times), was very involved in debates about the financial crisis in the US and lent his authority as Nobel prize wnner to his support for Obama and government intervnetion in the economy.

2) Thomas Friedman (also new York Times), the most influential journalist in the world, whose column is syndicated to 100+ newspapers around the world, pro-Obama and has just brought out a book on why America needs to go Green and kickstart a new Green revolution worldwide, which hasd already sold hundred sof thousands of copies and may singlehandedly have a huge impact on the debate about environmentalism (I say ‘may’ — too early to say since the book has only just come out).

3) Mark Mazower. His acclaimed history book, ‘Hitler’s Empire’ (Allen Lane, 2008), was well reviewed, but - morte important for the long term - will I think have a huge impact on the way we think about Nazism and put together with the rest of his recent work will have a big impact on seeing wartime Europe from an east and south-east European rather than west European perspective.

David Herman

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Has to be Petraeus.

After his tour in Mosul, having done a Master’s and Doctorate at Princeton long before, he spent 16 months re-writing America’s counter-insurgency doctrine. Then he went back into theatre and used this intellectual output to win a war considered unwinnable by every other serious public intellectual.

When was the last time a war was remembered by the single General who won it? This war will be Petraeus’s forever. When was the last time that a war-owning General not only possessed a world-class PhD but also won his war after an extended intellectual retreat involving academic study, philosophical reflection, and the writing of a classic?

The doctrine document alone is worth the prize: it’s probably the only written piece of intellectual output in the last two years that has made a direct difference to the lives of millions of people and an indirect but real contribution to huge swathes of the economic and political real world — and the only written achievement from that period that will be discussed, much less read, in 20 or 100 years.

Outside of the hard sciences, the rest is fairly frivolous by comparison.