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The spirit of the literary sideswipe has penetrated to other media -- a recent episode of Radio Four's The Moral Maze on the value or otherwise of prisons found chair Michael Buerk summing up an ex-convict's experience with: "You clearly did reform and did a university degree." It was not totally clear who was responsible for the interjection "What a quaint definition of reform", but it sounded suspiciously like LSE historian David Starkey.