Labour badly wants its story in which the state can help parents to look after their brood, leaving the children cleverer, healthier and more likely to succeed to be true.
At Shepheard's Hotel in Cairo Lucy makes friends with a whole host of archaeologists, their wives, their servants, and, most crucially, their children, a clever mix of real and fictional characters that includes Carter and his patron, Lord Carnarvon.
This year Bristol got 500 applications from pupils with straight As for the 47 places in its English department.Don't shoot the universitiesIf the government's aim is to find out which children are clever, and which have been crammed, then setting up quotas or discriminating against people on the basis of their postcode is not the way to go about it.
The verses in Belloc's "Bad Child's Book of Beasts" and "More Beasts for Worse Children" are clever, but, to me, they lack the inspired nonsense of the "Cautionary Tales," and the only one I still quote with irritating frequency is "The Crocodile," whose closing six-line crescendo spreads over five illustrated pages.
The trouble is that young actors of either sex always suffer a little from the dog-on-its-hind-legs syndrome: children look clever if they can just say their lines in a sassy way but their precocity may not be so startling as they enter their mid-thirties.
We have never seen children this clever, confident, and brave," said Zubair Ahmad, Assistant Director of Pakistan's Child Protection and Welfare Bureau.
I also think I half-expected them to talk about me, their wonderful youngest child, so clever, so handsome, no doubt a famous writer some day.
Ordinary people wonder about the source of their failings and virtues, and would like to know whether they can make their children better, cleverer and happier than they themselves have been.
Policies focused on the brightest tend to make the pages of newspapers and appeal to people who think their child is clever (yes, I'm sure yours really is) and who too often have a sense of entitlement about public services.
Send us a photo of you or your child's clever, weird or funny costume, any time between now and November 1st! We'll pick the best ones and celebrate them here on the comedy page!
