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I once asked the Christian brother who took the fourth form religious education class at my secondary school

if you really mess up with all your relations and friends again when you got to heaven. I mean even those you

couldn't stand? Well as I remember Brother Alexander explained that the idea of

meeting someone that you didn't like in heaven was an impossibility.

Heaven was a utopia which everyone loved everyone else because they were all

united in their love of God. Now boys any other questions? Well years later during my

radical days I remember having rather similar concerns about the communist utopia which we occasionally

allowed ourselves to visualize when we were selling copies of our newspaper outside factory gates.

What would happen to all those old capitalists when they found themselves in this new utopia?

Oh good, would they say? The states withered away?

Well, I imagine that some rather similar thoughts about the disjunction between utopian hopes and dull reality

are likely to be aired during next week's LSE's literary festival, a festival which commemorates

the 500th anniversary of the publication of Thomas More's Utopia

with a series of talks and debates bearing such titles as the allure of happy endings,

Utopias in History and where utopias go wrong.

Well we can have our own special preview of such utopian matters because here in the studio I'm now

joined by Professor Craig Calhoun who this

Thursday, that's the 18th, will be launching the whole event with a talk called

Can Imagination Change the world? Can it Craig? Of course it can. And in fact without

imagination we'd have a hard time making any choices about our future.

...