Long exposure to the “Free Thinking” festival, beamed out each autumn from the Sage, Gateshead, under the supervision of such Radio 3 trusties as Anne McElvoy and Philip Dodd, suggests that each debate has a tendency to throw up a star performer. This is not to disparage the efforts of the other speakers, merely to say that most of the conversations involve a contributor whose personal experience sets them slightly apart from the others or whose angle on the subject under discussion is so left-field that mainstream opinion follows rather timorously in their wake.The undoubted hero of The Family is Dead! Long Live the Family! (24 November), for example, was the writer Tobias Jones, a man so convinced of the attractions of domestic life to those who had the misfortune to be deni