Energy is vital to our economic and social well-being. Economic growth would be impossible without the ready availability of fuels to provide affordable heat, light and motive and electrical power. Yet the provision of power from fossil fuels poses a major threat to our environment, for we live, most of us now accept, in a globally warming world. Low-carbon technology will be essential in powering tomorrow's world in a sustainable way.

It has been said that extrapolation of the present North American per capita energy consumption to the world's population of 6 billion people would require the resources of several additional Earths to cope with the waste products, in particular the CO2 (carbon dioxide) emissions that come from burning fossil fuels. Clearly that is unsustainable. Sustainable development, a concept popularised by the Brundlandt Report of 1987, is generally understood to mean development that enables us to meet our present needs without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. The UK government has been committed to sustainable development since 1994, and now monitors national progress in achieving sustainability in energy supply and consumption, as well as in other areas of life. ‘National emissions of greenhouse gases’ is one of the Department of Trade and Industry's (DTI's) six headline indicators of sustainability.

But would a sustainable energy policy pay for the sequestration of anthropogenic CO2 emissions or for raising coastal defences to cope with rising sea levels?

Is all the world a movie, and are all the men and women in it merely players? In the twenty-first century, in the Western world and many other parts of the globe, the screen is as widespread a medium for narrative as the page was in the nineteenth, or the stage in the sixteenth century. The miniaturisation and accessibility of audiovisual equipment enables people to use moving images much as earlier generations used paper, pencil and pen to record and tell stories. In fact, there are a hundred years of history behind the development of contemporary screen language, and screen literacy is a refined art. How does it work to engage and affect us? Exemplified through close reference to movies and interactive titles from 1922 to 2002, this examination of the workings of screen narrative follows the evolution of the fictive world beyond the 2-D frame from cinema to computer screen – from 2-D to 3-D to 4-D.

Though often featuring actors playing roles, film drama is recorded and delivered through lenses, the camera representing a single viewpoint, mediating the story via an inbuilt observer, narrator or character. Film-makers thus wield the narrative powers of both novelists (who control viewpoint and narrative stance absolutely in their writing) and dramatists (who offer the interplay between characters, observable from a number of perspectives, as the vehicle for narrative) to spellbind their audiences.

Most animals rarely kill their own. Among non-human primates, for example, many species live in social groups and fight with their neighbours. Battles involve loud calls, displays, chases and occasional grapples – just enough for the larger or stronger group to convince its opponent to retreat. Yet although inter-group contests may be intense and frequent, and although they may determine access to critical resources, they hardly ever lead to death. For most primates the goal is to win or to retreat without being damaged.

But humans often aim to kill. So why is our species different? Why do we regularly and deliberately kill our own kind?

At the simplest level there are two kinds of answer: killing is either unnatural or natural. The contrasting positions are encapsulated by the ideas of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Thomas Hobbes, who have become icons for opposing views of human nature. For Rousseau, we are an essentially peaceful species. For Hobbes, war is our natural state. As we will see, both positions can be criticized.

Rousseau's thinking was dominated by the concept of the ‘noble savage’. He was so impressed by reports of people's spontaneous tendency to care for each other that he claimed conflict was absent in a state of nature. ‘With passions so tame’, he wrote, ‘and so salutary a curb, men, rather wild than wicked, and more attentive to guard against mischief than to do any to other animals, were not exposed to any dangerous dissensions’.

Most people in the world feel powerless. There are three key political questions: ‘What's going on?’, ‘Why?’ and ‘What can we do about it?’ But if you ask ‘What's going on?’, people say, ‘I'm not quite sure.’ ‘Why?’ ‘Well, nobody's told me.’ ‘What can we do about it?’ ‘Probably not very much.’ That sense of powerlessness explains an awful lot of what we talk about as apathy, cynicism and so on, and this is what I want to address. I want to look at some of the sources of power, what they are, how they operate, who controls them, and ask the question, ‘How can we get some influence over the powers that exist in order to improve our own lives?’

The most obvious example of power is power by conquest. Julius Caesar tried to get us into the European Union in 55 BC, and we still use the penny, which was a Roman coin. Margaret Thatcher was not the first Iron Lady – Boudicca killed 7000 Romans and raised the Men of Essex in order to deal with the Treaty of Rome. Power by conquest was the basis of all the great empires of the past. The British Empire is one example – when I was born in 1925, 20 per cent of the population of the world was governed from London. Now we live in an American empire. There are certain consequences of that, which impinge upon the way our politics are conducted.

Conflict and labour are inextricably linked. But the link is not straight-forward, and nor are the symptoms of conflict. This essay is concerned with how both the link and the symptoms have changed. And the change has been very substantial. Strike levels are currently remarkably low in historical terms, both in Britain and worldwide. But despite this, I shall argue that the significance of conflict to the relationship between employer and employee is undiminished. Indeed, the implication of my argument is that the fall in strikes is itself a matter for concern.

Let me start by emphasizing two sharply contrasting aspects of labour. The image of industrial conflict with which anyone over the age of about thirty will be familiar is one of rowdy picket lines, locked factory gates, indignant banners and even police in riot gear. But it is now twenty years since the bitter national coal-miners' strike ended. That year-long dispute, which split and broke a once-powerful trade union, both symbolized and hastened the end of a period of British history during which overt labour conflict was rarely out of the headlines.

Contrast that with a far more familiar employment scene in Britain in the twenty-first century, to be found, for example, anywhere in the Fens of Eastern England; one of recent migrant workers, tending, picking and packing vegetables. They come from all over the world: Lithuanians, Poles, Chinese, Brazilians, Portuguese, Kurds and so on. Some are directly employed by the farmers, more are employed through gang-master agencies.

Why should the topic of sex differences in mind have any relevance to the theme of conflict, the focus of this book and lecture series? In my view, there are two links.

First, some consider that the male and female mind are so intrinsically different that conflict in some form – for example, mutual misunderstanding – is inevitable. I will argue that there are interesting differences between the average male and female mind but that recognizing these need not lead to conflict and instead could lead to mutual respect of difference. In using the word ‘average’, I am from the outset recognizing that such differences may have little to say about individuals, a point I will return to. In addition, the features that define the average male and female mind are not like chalk and cheese. The average male and female mind contains both chalk and cheese, as it were. The differences are subtle, and are to do with the relative proportions of chalk and cheese in the typical male and female mind. Fear not. I will get away from this metaphor quite soon, and define the qualities that we can quantify. But it does mean that because the male mind is not all chalk, and the female mind all cheese, the two sexes are not destined to be mystified by the other.

During 2005, scientists working with the Chandra X-Ray Observatory reported detecting the biggest cosmic explosion ever. A galaxy situated 2.6 billion light years away has been ravaged by a monstrous black hole that has swallowed the equivalent of 300 million suns in an orgy of destruction that has been going on for 100 million years. This ingested material isn't going quietly. As the scattered debris plunges to oblivion within the black hole, it releases vast amounts of energy, creating a pair of high-speed jets that have blasted twin bubbles 650,000 light years across in the host galaxy. You wouldn't want to be living anywhere nearby that monster!

Violence is the leitmotif of the universe. It was born in a big bang. Its fundamental structure was forged in the first split second, in a searing maelstrom of unimaginable ferocity, at temperatures exceeding a trillion degrees. Its history is one of cataclysmic explosions, implosions and collisions of literally astronomical proportions, of titanic forces and enormous energies. Yet amid this cosmic mayhem, life has not only emerged, but flourished – at least it has on one planet. How has something so delicate and precious as biology made a home amid the chaos of a violent universe?

The take-home message of my essay is that violence has a creative as well as a destructive aspect, and that without exceedingly energetic and powerful processes that seem so awesome to human beings, life would be impossible.

In his Principles of Psychology, William James discussed five types of decisions. Most decisions he noted are decisions without effort, but in the

After consideration of the kinds of decisions that are made with, and without, effort, James concluded that ‘effort complicates volition … whenever a rarer and more ideal impulse is called upon to neutralize others of a more instinctive and habitual kind’ (p. 1154).

Years ago, as a member of the National Youth Theatre, I recall watching rehearsals of Richard III from the wings as the Alarums and Excursions of Bosworth Field were being conjured up by an over-enthusiastic scrum of lads laying about each other with sword and mace at the back of the stage. The director was bellowing above the din, ‘Boys and girls, please do not kill each other. This is drama. No one need die.’

Conflict of all kind runs through Shakespeare's plays, many of the plots turning on it – emotional, historic, martial. He knew how to keep the audience's attention. And at the final curtain, the audience left the theatre and returned to a world which they knew was uncertain and shaped by war, but was incalculably different to the world of the stage.

Television also presents a kind of stage. We can witness both comedy and tragedy. However, it is as if the back wall of the stage dissolves every so often – and the real life that is walking past is thrust centre-stage, on-screen. Such is the technique of television that it is not always obvious what is reality and what is fiction. I have only to refer you to the constant enquiries to the BBC of those people who wish to have a drink in the Queen Vic pub in EastEnders.

Space, time and power are fundamentals of physics that determine the dynamic structure of our lives. Recent publications from the Darwin College Lecture Series have addressed two of these topics: Space in the 2001 lecture series and Time in 2000. Each of those volumes included a range of perspectives that span the arts, humanities and sciences. Now, in this new volume, we have invited seven international authorities to analyse and interpret the theme of Power as it is understood in their different fields of learning. The subjects that they consider include not only the sources of power that humanity has at its disposal, but also the forms of power that are exerted over us by cultural products and societies.

Life on earth, and of course all human activity, depends on the availability of sufficient power to support that activity. Mary Archer starts our exploration of power by considering where this power comes from. Drawing both on her academic work as a researcher in chemistry and Professor of Energy Policy, and on her public life including presidency of the National Energy Foundation, Archer reviews and forecasts human power usage and supply. Her chapter on the future of sustainable power sources addresses the rate with which we consume fossil fuel resources, and the alternatives that might supply the hundreds of exajoules we consume each year.

In the opening sequence of his 1968 film 2001 – a space odyssey, Stanley Kubrick offers a stunning image of the beginning of warfare when one of his ape men picks up a long bone from a decaying animal carcass and uses it to bludgeon an opponent to death. In Kubrick's brilliant orchestration of this moment there is a palpable sense of awe and wonder among the creatures as their minds come to terms with the magnitude of the discovery. To Kubrick, it is a defining moment – the beginning of man's progress to civilization. This is a stark, uncomfortable, message which we need to examine in some detail.

Enter the philosophers

The nature of human aggression has long fascinated philosophers. One of the first to confront the problem head on was the British philosopher Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679). Oxford-trained, he lived through, and survived, the Civil War, an experience which cannot have failed to have had an impact on his thinking. Politically he walked a difficult tight-rope. He was a firm believer in strong government, and therefore supported the King against Parliament, but he was not prepared to accept the divine right of kings. His basic philosophy was that of a materialist who believed that rational explanations could be found for all human behaviour.

In his famous work Leviathan, published in English in 1651, he addresses the question of ‘the state of nature’.

Perhaps the most popular perception of music's power is as a force acting upon or representing emotions such as love, hate, fear, joy and sadness. Because of its emotional impact, music also possesses a political power that can be exerted in the forging of national and social class identities. The British National Anthem offers a telling case study of such power. A subject frequently linked to politics is economics, and here again music exerts its might. The value of the music sector to the UK economy was an estimated £2.5 billion in 1995, according to a National Music Council Report (Eliff, Feist and Laing 1996: 5). Four record companies (BMG, Universal, Sony and Time-Warner) currently control over 80 per cent of the global record market. When the Spice Girls split up, the price of EMI shares fell immediately by 10 pence. Their recovery was helped by pop star Britney Spears. Alas, on 28 January 2002 EMI's shares fell again, this time slipping 14 pence after Deutsche Bank warned that the shareholders' dividend was likely to be halved. This was a consequence of the company's decision to pay one of its artists not to sing. The sales of Mariah Carey's latest album had been disappointing, but EMI were locked into a deal to fund several more of her albums, so offered her instead a pay-off of £19.6 million. Major record companies are dealing with stars whose financial value is greater than the gross domestic product of some small countries.