Over Laurie Taylor’s regular sociologists’ round table (6 May) there hangs a pleasantly old-fashioned air. Talk of Freudian psychology alternates with quotations from Bertrand Russell. An irate correspondent is said to “seethe”. The words “working class” recur like the tick of a metronome, and dimly in the ether beyond the well-informed and eminently reasonable tones of the presenter a procession of ghosts from the world of bygone cultural studies – Raymond Williams, for example, and Richard Hoggart – steals noiselessly by.Taylor began with a brief yet characteristic discussion of the modern-day division of domestic labour, before moving on to a horribly pertinent debate about the gentrification of the inner cities featuring a pair of academ