Obviously, this is a dystopian vision, not an economic prediction. Phyllis James, whom I knew quite well for 25 years or more, was, in her own words “superbly taught in the old grammar school tradition, scholarly, Christian, liberal”. She clung to all these qualities in adversity – a hard, poor father who thought girls should not go to university and made her leave school at 16; a broken, schizophrenic husband; children to be brought up on nothing much – and in her later, well-deserved prosperity. In her own life and thought, she had a strong Christian recognition of the existence of evil, but a stronger one of good. She had a great love of civilisation, sharpened by the knowledge that it was precarious. In the light of her faith, she understood that a society which lives for the present alone will despise the past and ignore the future. More and more of its citizens will not have children and therefore it will decline.