Thank you for your many kind comments on our eighth-birthday Tale for Our Time. There are sixty-nine others in our extensive archive. Our seventieth, however, is Three Men on the Bummel, Jerome K Jerome's comic romp of 1900. Steyn Clubber Fraser Sutherland writes re the author's observations on cultural differences:

I lived and worked in Bavaria for three years; as a firm result of that experience I concluded that there was a lot in the widely-held view that the German people lived for the State and not the other way round - as the 'British' so fondly believed of themselves. This cultural inclination became apparent in the gradual accretion of small incidents broadly described as: inordinate respect for the system and an excess of self-effacement when confronted, or even just engaged by, Authority.

However, still more broadly, at a point journeying southwards through the Brenner Pass, emerging into the glorious light of an Italy expanding into the distance, I always heaved a sigh of relief at being liberated from a certain kind of Germanic petty psychological oppression.

Every night it amazes me how Jerome's insights, swaddled in sequences of brilliant writing (not to mention laced through with that idiosyncratic humour), continue to be so relevant 125 or so years later.

Indeed, Fraser. The eight young Milan-bound Germans I mentioned earlier certainly felt as you did.

Tonight's episode begins with some thoughts on the particular qualities of German education:

The English boy plays till he is fifteen, and works thence till twenty. In Germany it is the child that works; the young man that plays. The German boy goes to school at seven o'clock in the summer, at eight in the winter, and at school he studies. The result is that at sixteen he has a thorough knowledge of the classics and mathematics, knows as much history as any man compelled to belong to a political party is wise in knowing, together with a thorough grounding in modern languages. Therefore his eight College Semesters, extending over four years, are, except for the young man aiming at a professorship, unnecessarily ample. He is not a sportsman, which is a pity, for he should make good one. He plays football a little, bicycles still less; plays French billiards in stuffy cafés more. But generally speaking he, or the majority of him, lays out his time bummeling, beer drinking, and fighting.

It is the last - the fighting - on which Jerome focuses. As to playing till you're fifteen and working till twenty or vice-versa, in the leisurely decadent varsity of the contemporary west, you play till you're twenty-seven and work not at all.

If you're a member of The Mark Steyn Club you can hear Part Twenty of our serialisation of Three Men on the Bummel simply by clicking here and logging-in. All previous episodes can be found here.

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To become a member of The Mark Steyn Club, please click here - and don't forget our special Gift Membership, which makes a perfect birthday present. The minute you sign up you'll have access to all seventy Tales for Our Time, including my serialisations of Nineteen Eighty-Four, The Time Machine and The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. And please join me tomorrow evening for Part Twenty-One of Three Men on the Bummel.