So far as I can recall, I have only once had a glass thrown over me in my professional life. (Close readers will note that I have avoided including my private life in the tally.) The place where I wore someone else's drink was Cambridge University. At the time, I brushed off the incident as proof that Cambridge students had forgotten the better ways in which to dispense the good stuff. But in truth the throw came from a student in the Union bar enraged by what I had just said in a debate about the undemocratic nature of the Iranian regime. Adding to a quiet pleasure in the fact that the alcoholic missile was one of which the mullahs would for once have disapproved, if the dry-cleaner is to be called for a political cause, then it strikes me that Iranian democracy is as good as any.

I mention this only because as we head towards the end of Michaelmas term ("Christmas" for the rest of the world), I have finished yet another round of talks at universities. Once again, I am both impressed and disheartened.

I have spoken on university campuses ever since leaving my own in the summer of 2001. I remember hostile receptions early on, particularly one at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London where I spoke fondly of Israel. The flip-chairs in the auditorium snapped up one by one - a sort of negative staggered standing ovation. Today, the situation is palpably different. We have a generation graduating who were at school when 9/11 was perpetrated and who went up to university in 2005, the summer of the London bombings. More and more, I notice the question they ask is not "Is there a problem?" or "What is the problem?" but rather "What do we do about it?"

For the last couple of years, I have been invited to speak on campuses more frequently, and most weeks I find myself doing a couple. It's usually a students' union or a political or religious society. A couple of weeks ago, I had the pleasure of giving the inaugural talk to the secular society at a university up north. I try to be available for students because, as anyone who cares about the culture wars knows, this is where they are most fiercely and decisively (for the sake of future opinion-formers) fought.