It's time for Britain to take a long hard look at herself writes Hugh Williams.

British politician Frank Field talks to Mary Lean about gun control, sleaze and the moral force of the welfare state.

Enlightened management seem to have taken on board that people operate best when they are given responsibility. Even when this is not given them, workers sometimes grasp the initiative. This is one conclusion to be drawn from a conference organized recently by the British-shop floor paper The Industrial Pioneer.

Commuters in Western cities are becoming inured to the sight of the young person huddled under a blanket in the railway station. He holds a cardboard notice: `Hungry, broke and homeless'. What can be done? Mike Lowe takes London as a case-study.

Eastern Europe came a little closer for hundreds of British pupils as a result of a chance encounter between Mariana Zaharieva and school-teacher Howard Grace last summer. Mariana and her husband Angel Zahariev from Bulgaria were attending a conference on `Shaping the New Europe' in Caux, Switzerland, when they met Grace. He had been taking a play he had written to schools around Britain, to encourage sixth-formers to think beyond themselves.

Troubled by the Irish question, English doctor John Lester feels the need for a clinical examination of his own attitudes:

It is the behaviour of some of his white compatriots that from time to time causes him to question whether he really belongs in Britain.

'After praying to know what was right, I felt I should accept,' he said. And so his diplomatic career began - unsolicited.

Fifty years ago this month a large English country house became a centre where people could find new aims and motivation. Kenneth Noble reports:

In a child's first six years, it develops two thirds of its adult intelligence. Elizabeth Bradburn is an expert on this all important stage of education. Paul Williams tells her story.