In about a decade, its indefatigable stream of commentators will celebrate the 500th anniversary of Thomas More's Utopia or On the Best State of a Republic (1516). That's a long time to be a focus of attention. The quantity of ink this text has generated suggests that, like a Rorschach blot, it enables us to project outwards our obsessions, our fantasies, our day-dreams, our hopes of a return to an irretrievable past golden age or our yearning for an unrealizable future paradise.