NOW that we are indisputably in a new century, what will be the word most on world leaders' lips throughout the next 100 years? The same one that has been most of their lips for the past 100 years: peace.

Let's go back further. Not to Biblical times and that "Peace on Earth" promise, though that is the marker we need to keep permanently in view. Late in the 19th Century, Thomas Hardy, in his Dorset home, was disturbed one night by the sound of gunnery practice in the English Channel.

He imagined the noise wakening the dead in the nearby churchyard. God addresses them: "Just as before you went below, the world is as it used to be: all nations striving strong to make red war yet redder.''

Fast forward to 1945. The atom bombs that ended the Second World War brought no joy to Siegfried Sassoon, the poet whose entire life was haunted by his experiences in the trenches of the first. Writing of our thralldom to our "marvellous monkey innovations'', he offered up this savagely-ironic prayer: "Lord God of cruelties incomprehensible and randomised damnations indefensible, perfect in us thy tyrannous technique for torturing the innocent and weak.''

Well, we vigorously pursue that great mission. Our latest "marvellous monkey innovation'' is the thermobaric bomb, which explodes over its target, releasing fuel which ignites to cause a hideous shock wave and wall of fire. Designed for urban warfare, it poses a big risk to civilians. But, as a military spokesmen said on Radio 4: "These things are out there and we've got to acknowledge that.'' This is the reality. Politicians will go on talking of peace, which will never arrive. Weapons will become more horrific.

In 1933 Sassoon wrote: "My hopes, my messengers, I sent across the ten years' Continent of time. None returned... like one in purgatory I learned the loss of hope.'' He later noted how "to thwart all ministries of mercy, came the arrogant inventiveness of man''. Put to destructive, inhumane purpose that inventiveness continues unchecked.

WAS he affected by witnessing the death of his mother as a child? Did he have an urge to play God? The psychoanalysis of Harold Shipman overlooks one obvious, very mundane motive for his appalling crimes: laziness. All those ailing old people to administer to. What a drag with their drooling, their incontinence, their immobility - if not now, then soon. How much easier to tidy them out of the way before they became too much trouble.

THOUGH I've been part of the media for 44 years, I still know very little about it. Why, for instance, is there suddenly an avalanche of articles and TV programmes about the Hindu festival of Kumbh Mela, billed as the "Greatest Show on Earth?'' Though it takes place in India every 12 years, I've never previously heard of it. Yet in 1989, 30 million people attended, and in the 1950s 500 pilgrims died in a stampede. If Western indifference to Eastern culture explains why the festival was largely ignored in the past, it doesn't begin to account for the massive publicity this time.

COMING in at No 6, the arrival of Harry for the first time in the list of top ten names prompts a spokeswoman for the Office of National Statistics to say: "The name Harry is a fairly modern phenomenon.'' A bit of a Methusela Harry myself, I was named after an uncle born early this century. I'm told there has always been a Harry in our family.

And we Harrys have nothing but contempt for half-Harrys, those christened Henry, a different character altogether. As my wife, attracted to me at 14 partly by the rakish, school-rule defying angle I wore my cap, says: "A Henry would never dream of wearing his cap any way except dead straight.''

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