So what can be done to help liberate us? We need to learn some manners. The suggestion could sound archaic. There's a well-worn tradition of mocking the fancy dinner party. It's often pointed out that as people's manners become exquisite, their interactions become ever more stilted. Yet history shows that conversations grow interesting and sincere precisely at the moment when people accept a little artificiality in the proceedings. We need prescriptions and rules to get us to the natural and raw parts of our characters. Consider the record of the greatest conversation in the Western tradition, Plato's Symposium. The evening is as minutely choreographed as a piece of theatre. A group of intellectual Athenians takes it in turns to deliver discourses on the nature of love while eating a banquet, featuring olives and seafood. A close eye is kept on the clock. People are asked to define their terms and avoid unnecessary digressions. There is no mention of the weather. The guests know they have come together to illuminate an intellectual concern and their conversation therefore has a direction. There is a sense of where the talk is going, the hosts are keen to give their guests the greatest of dinner-party gifts: some ideas to take home with them.

It was to the ancient Greeks that the French aristocracy and haute bourgeoisie looked when they began to hold their famous salons in 18^th-century Paris. Fed up with the idle chatter of the court at Versailles, where the talk centred relentlessly on who had shot what and in which forest, they wanted to make their homes into the spiritual descendants of Socrates's dining room. One of the greatest salon hostesses of the period, Sophie de Condorcet, wrote down a touching set of rules for a successful evening of conversation. She believed that guests had to arrive with a number of conversational topics and explore them with the same rigour as a scholar in a library, except that rather than consulting books, it was the other guests that were to provide the insights. Examples of fitting topics included: what are the duties of children to their parents? What is the wisest way to approach one's own death? Can governments make us good or only obedient?

The topics may not precisely fit the agenda of early 21^st-century men and women, but the logic behind Madame de Condorcet's approach is still valid, namely that we need to plan a little in order to have a good conversation. A few years back the academic Theodore Zeldin, who has written extensively on 18^th-century France, tried to raise the art of conversation in our own times when he began a series of public meals in Oxford. Groups of strangers came together and, under his gentle but firm direction, agreed to lay aside their inhibitions and explore experiences, ideas, regrets and aspirations. Zeldin provided diners with a specially-designed conversation menu that he thought would help people get the most from talking to a stranger. It started by getting diners to look at questions like: "Which of my ambitions is likely to remain unfulfilled?" or "Is sex overrated?"