During the winter months my granny always made me stovies on a Saturday and she would spoon them on top of the hot pie and I would sit at a table in front of the fire eating contentedly and thinking about the films I had seen that morning. Stovies, as my grandmother made them, were potatoes and onions cut into pieces and cooked slowly in a pan with only a covering of water at the bottom of the pan, a tablespoonful of roast beef dripping and some salt and pepper. They were delicious.

Yet this omnipotent assembly, and the superomnipotent majority therein, are not allowed to have their own way!

Your mum will have kittens when she sees what you've done to your hair!

Since the launch early last year of […] two Silicon Valley start-ups offering free education through MOOCs, massive open online courses, the ivory towers of academia have been shaken to their foundations. University brands built in some cases over centuries have been forced to contemplate the possibility that information technology will rapidly make their existing business model obsolete.