Sarah Dunant asks if we should judge the past by the standards of the present or future, as shifting social attitudes colour our view of how the past is portrayed. "What current historians share with those historians of the past whose vision we vehemently decry, is that they too thought they were right at the time...If we now find their views abhorrent and unjust then how about us; what might there be about our present moral certainty that the future might take issue with. What might we be missing?" Producer: Sheila Cook Sound: Peter Bosher Production Coordinator: Gemma Ashman

David Goodhart rejects what he calls the 'Eton conspiracy myth' of a cabal of his old school's alumni at the top of politics and welcomes its declining influence as a sign of growing equality. "The Eton obsession not only overlooks progress made in slowly detaching our elite institutions from privilege, it also distracts from a hard-headed discussion about what we want from our elite." Producer: Sheila Cook

Zoe Strimpel reflects on the impact of rapid home delivery on the way we live our lives, and asks what our human experience might lose from this democratisation of laziness. "A whole generation is about to come of age experiencing goods and service as simply things you can have delivered to your doorstep, fast. Will their brains cease to distinguish between different types of desire and demand?...Will they lose the capacity to form plans and commit to them, plans as minor as what to cook later that night?" Producer: Sheila Cook

Adam Gopnik on why a visit to get his phone repaired resulted in an unlikely revelation. Watching those waiting alongside him, Adam comes to the realisation that we have poured ourselves so completely into our phones that the devices, paradoxically, are the one place where we can picture ourselves as selves. They have become the equivalent of the confession booths of old, or the diary in the 18th century. "We all need some box to hold our fears and desires as the winds of the world threaten to blow us away," he concludes. Producer: Adele Armstrong

Howard Jacobson ponders why he's always associated Christmas with the sea. Strange, he reckons, given he's not exactly maritime by temperament. 'Long ago at Blackpool,' he writes, 'I was lifted onto a donkey and afterwards told to make a sandcastle, but I fell off the donkey and wilder boys in Brillo-pad swimming trunks trampled over my battlements'. He looks to Matthew Arnold for an explanation of this 'mysterious nexus of sea and Santa'. Producer: Adele Armstrong