Ihad forgotten how well I remembered her. But I hadn't forgotten her. It was, naturally, a shrink who brought it all back and put it in perspective. A rather good shrink: the psychoanalyst Susie Orbach. She did it for free. In public. On the radio. A discussion programme about sibling relationships, chaired by Laurie Taylor. I talked a bit about how I'd never really properly invested, on an emotional level, in my relationships with my sister or indeed, come to that, my parents. Or my family in general.

"You should come and consult me professionally," said Susie; "get to the bottom of it. I mean, if you mind about it, of course."

If I mind about it. Christ. I remember once on the Provençal terrace of a friend's house, bathed in the smell of the lavender – and melon-fields, towards twilight, after dinner. A fellow guest said that she supposed it was always a comfort to know that, if things got really bad and everything went wrong and she failed utterly and the world turned against her, she could always go home and they'd be pleased to see her and would comfort her and tuck her up and it would be all right again. And I thought: what on earth is she talking about? For me, it was quite the opposite. It was closer to Lady Thatcher's definition: "Home is where you go and they have to take you in." Have to. But not necessarily want to. In the end, I realised I was wrong. But it had always felt as if home was where you went when there was no chink in your armour, when there were no lapses or guilty secrets, no failures or defaults, nobody cross with you or out to get you. Home was where, if the secret police rang the bell, they'd lock the back door to prevent you getting away. Home was profoundly unsafe.

Mind? Of course I minded. It was like football: a common, unifying experience which I simply didn't get. Football didn't matter, though. This did.

Then Orbach said something – I don't remember what – and I remembered my memories. I remembered the first time I saw her – this was in the late 1950s. I remembered her dark hair, her deep brown eyes, her watchful stillness, her intelligent gaze. I remembered that when she looked at me for the first time, she smiled. I remembered something like falling in love.

"I had another sister once," I said. "They sent her back."

For once, the studio – normally a civil sort of a bear-pit, everyone anxious to say their piece – fell silent.

"I was ... three and a half? Four? They adopted a baby. I remember her name. Beverley Henderson. 'This is your new sister,' they said. And then after a few weeks – I don't know how long in reality – she was gone. They sent her back. I never saw her again."

After the broadcast, walking to the lifts, Susie Orbach said: "You know what I said about coming to see me? Forget it. We've got to the bottom of it, on-air. No wonder. What a thing to do to a child."

"Send her back?" I said.

"No. She was probably fine. I mean to you. To give you the idea that it could happen to you, too. That you could be sent back. For no reason. Just ... sent back."

There was no reason, either. None that I could ever find out, once I had remembered it all. After my mother died, I asked my father. "I never got to the bottom of it," he said. "but I think it was because Mummy thought people would realise it wasn't her own baby. She was very dark."

The dark hair. The dark eyes. The locus of this infant's beauty and the source of her rejection? Absurd; yet not absurd to think that that would seem reasonable to my mother who was, bless her, afraid of so much. Afraid, particularly, of being found out. Found out in what? Your guess is as good as mine. Just as she was ashamed, though of what I don't know and never will. Yet her shoulders, designed as far as I can tell centuries back in some poxy shtetl to carry the burdens of the world, had devolved into a huge support system for her chips. I'll never know what was going on in her mind. I don't think she ever did, either. But she sent my dark sister back.

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There is a tendency to belittle the St Leger, the oldest, longest and toughest of the five English Classics, as an irrelevance in the modern arena. Its distance, a gruelling, extended mile and three-quarters, is nowadays seen as way beyond the optimum for a potential stallion to advertise his merits, a kiss of death in the bloodstock industry that drives the sport on the track.

That last is undoubtedly true; the last St Leger hero to become champion sire was Nijinsky, who completed his Triple Crown at Doncaster, and the only recent winner who is not currently doing duty as a jumps sire is Conduit, who subsequently netted three top-level wins over shorter before starting his second career in Japan.

But the St Leger, a Group One contest with a prize fund of more than £500,000, is still a race the professionals want on their CV and, importantly, provides a compelling spectacle as equine fortitude is tested the length of the demanding Doncaster straight. The top yards love to win it; the Godolphin team, responsible for this year's favourite, Rewilding, will be seeking their sixth success in the Ladbrokes-sponsored 234th running and the Ballydoyle operation, with the second market choice Midas Touch and Joshua Tree due to line up, their fourth.

And if these horses are merely very, very good, rather than brilliant, so what? True brilliance is rare commodity and the best on Saturday week may prove in coming seasons to be exactly the sort of durable top-level performers the sport now demands. Conduit, for instance, went on to take a King George and two Breeders' Cup Turfs; Scorpion a Coronation Cup; Mutafaweq a Deutschland-Preis, a Coronation Cup and a Canadian International.

The St Leger's position in the calendar historically made it the seasonal decider for top horses but its status in the modern era has been eroded not only by the condemnation by the breeding industry of the once-prized virtue of stamina, but also by a plethora of alternative valuable autumn targets.

As such it is no longer the automatic destination for a Derby winner; the last to face the Town Moor challenge was Reference Point, who was owned by a true Turf traditionalist, Louis Freedman, and completed the Classic double in 1987. But the race will still be graced this time with solid Epsom form in the shape of the Derby third Rewilding and Snow Fairy, winner of the Oaks.

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Few would deny that Nicolas Sarkozy's political rise has been full of drama. But with his term due to expire in two years' time, the French President may not be overjoyed to learn that his career is to be made into a film about "the conquest of power" – to be released uncomfortably close to his bid for re-election.

The story of the immigrants' son who became Jacques Chirac's protégé, who went on to betray his mentor and become President of the Republic, is being filmed in Paris as La Conquête (the conquest). The first movie to examine the career of a French president while he is still in office, it will cover the years between 2002 and 2007, stopping just short of Carla Bruni and his years in the top job.

Few details have emerged from the film's production company. But according to the screenwriter Patrick Rotman, it will be a meticulously researched fiction in the Anglo-Saxon tradition.

Denis Podalydès, who is playing the lead role, has insisted that he has no axe to grind with the President. "It's a film about the conquest of power in our mediatised democracy," he told La Provence. "I will not judge or caricature Sarkozy. My job is to make him lifelike, to give him substance, to play on his contradictions."

But controversy has already been attached to Podalydès' casting. Previously acclaimed as Jean-Paul Sartre and Richard II, some say that he doesn't look mean or hungry enough to play Mr Sarkozy. And his receding hairline is unlikely to delight the famously vain President.

Indeed, the President's foibles have led some to speculate that the film is almost bound to cast him in a comical light. The President's hair-trigger temper, his high heels and a sense of latent violence seem to be the very qualities that make him a candidate for the box office.

There is little doubt that the period before his premiership contains plenty of material for a movie. His relationships with his first wife, Cécilia, and with his former mentor Mr Chirac were famously explosive. Cécilia guided her frenetic husband through periodical depressions, but although she had her office in the ministry of the interior when he was minister there, the marriage degenerated. By 2007, the couple were on such bad terms that she didn't even vote for her husband.

Mr Chirac, meanwhile, may be portrayed as a discarded father figure. He treated Mr Sarkozy like a son, but later Mr Sarkozy rallied support by making unkind remarks about Mr Chirac. "From a cinematic point of view, he stabbed his father," says Dr Sudhir Hazareesingh, an expert in French politics.

But, Mr Hazareesingh warned, the film-makers should be aware of the risks their project entails – especially when Mr Sarkozy's approval ratings are hovering around 30 per cent. "He's incredibly petty and vindictive," he said. "It will be interesting to see how far the filmmakers are prepared to go."

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Impenetrable "clusters of privilege" are forming around the best state schools, Barnardo's, Britain's biggest children's charity, warns today. Poorer families are losing out to better-off neighbours who move house or attend church to get a better education.

Unfair admissions practices result in schools with skewed intakes that do not reflect their neighbourhoods, Barnardo's says, citing research that indicates the top secondary schools in England take on average just 5% of pupils entitled to free school meals.

Schools should be encouraged to admit pupils in "bands" based on their academic ability in order to increase the social mix, the charity recommends.

Government plans to expand the number of academies and create parent-led "free schools", which will control their own admissions, risk widening the gap.

Martin Narey, Barnardo's chief executive, said: "Secondary school admissions fail to ensure a level playing field for all children. Instead we are seeing impenetrable clusters of privilege forming around the most popular schools.

"Allowing such practice to persist – and almost certainly expand as increasing numbers of schools take control of their own admissions – will only sustain the achievement gap in education and undermine the prospects of the most disadvantaged and vulnerable children."

Narey said school admissions had become a "complex game, one that many parents in poorer households are not aware is going on around them.

"Even when conscious of a race for the best schools, some less confident and able parents are often overcome by a fatalism and are resigned to the fact that their son or daughter will be left with whatever school other parents don't want."

Although the school admissions code is meant to stop schools favouring better-off children, many parents from less well-educated backgrounds are still being deterred, the charity says.

Parents who lack confidence in their own writing skills find it hard to deal with complex forms. Voluntary-aided schools, which usually have a religious link, have forms that require detailed replies about religion.

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The great philosopher John Travolta once observed that, in France, a Quarter Pounder with Cheese is known as a "Royale with Cheese", while they call a Big Mac "Le Big Mac" and allow you to wash it down with beer. That's the "funniest thing" about Europe, he concluded, during the often quoted opening scene of Pulp Fiction: its people have embraced American culture without entirely losing their soul. "A lot of the same shit we got here, they got there. But there, they're just a little bit different."

Another thinker, Thomas Friedman, has also used McDonald's to riff about globalisation. In his bestselling book The Lexus and the Olive Tree, Friedman famously ventured that: "No two countries that both had a McDonald's had fought a war against each other since each got its McDonald's." Once a nation dines under the golden arches, he argued, it buys into freedom, democracy, and the American way. Children who grow up eating Happy Meals would rather spend their lives scoffing mass-produced burgers than making war.

On Saturday, the golden arches that provided Friedman, Travolta and legions of other modern opinion-formers with food for thought will reach an important milestone: their 70th birthday. On 15 May 1940, two brothers, Richard and Maurice (Dick and Mac) McDonald, opened their first restaurant, in San Bernadino – an unlovely city fringed by mountains, an hour's drive east of Los Angeles. Today more than 32,000 outlets in 117 countries bear their name. Three new ones open each day. China has over a thousand. The company that dreamt up "Le Big Mac" has managed, in the span of a single human lifetime, to devour the world.

Somewhere along the way, of course, McDonald's picked up quite an image problem. In fact, the ever expanding burger brand became a byword for Yankee imperialism. Critics accused the firm of exporting factory farming and obesity to an unwitting world; books such as Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation (2001) and films such as Super Size Me (2004) raised public scepticism about where junk food comes from and what it does to you. It became an unfeeling corporate villain, giving us McLibel, along with one of society's creepiest clowns, and seemed to be sending humankind the way of those lard-arsed caricatures in the film WALL-E.

Yet despite the PR difficulties, McDonald's kept on expanding (much like the world's waistbands) and in the past couple of years it has entered a sort of golden era. The other day, its shares touched an all-time high of $74, up from $12 in 2003. Across the world, its sales are sky-rocketing. The UK, where its brand was widely considered dead and buried in 2005 – with sales that had been flat for five years, and profits that had just collapsed by two thirds – is now the most successful foreign market in the US firm's history, with sales up £450m in 2009. This trend lays bare a long-standing fact: it's easy to knock McDonald's and everything it stands for, but when you hold your nose and peel back the greaseproof paper a surprisingly progressive institution sometimes emerges.

In the UK, for example, the firm puts its recent financial success down to a £95m "re-branding" exercise to reinvent itself as a touchy-feely retailer, where customers can now use free wi-fi , drink rainforest-friendly coffee with organic milk, and eat free-range eggs. Many of its 1,200 British restaurants are now painted green. In the US, meanwhile, recent years have seen a different kind of McMakeover. Here, your average suburban drive-thru now pays lip service to the very un-American concept of sensible eating, selling a vast range of vegetable wraps, salads, yoghurt, bottled water and fruit along with the usual salty fries and lardy burgers. In a departure from tradition, some of these supposedly healthy new meals even require customers to be able to handle a plastic knife and fork. Today, its biggest growth area is not beef patties or chicken nuggets, but gourmet coffee.

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It was hard to ignore the symbolism in the Manchester City directors' box on Monday night. On one side was Kenny Dalglish, the greatest player ever to play for the most successful club in Britain, and a few rows away was Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed al Nahyan, who will never know what it is like to score in front of the Kop but is exerting an influence over English football right now like no-one else.

It was the game that they were watching which put everything in perspective. Dalglish's Liverpool were demolished 3-0 by a City team that has benefited from £130million of investment this summer – about £40m more than it took to assemble the entire 18-man Liverpool squad. The context to the night was that Liverpool were without Javier Mascherano, whose desire to leave is another corollary of their dwindling force on the pitch and the chaos in their ownership.

Liverpool were never a selling club and, until two years ago, City were scarcely a net buying club. And while these are early days yet, you only have to look at the hesitation with which Liverpool have approached Fulham's £5m valuation of Paul Konchesky to know the difference in their two situations.

City have the lot. They have Emmanuel Adebayor on the substitutes' bench; they have Mario Balotelli in the stands and – debatable though it is in terms of the ethics of the game – they can afford to subsidise the wages of Craig Bellamy to keep him in the Championship and away from potential rivals. Everyone thinks they have good enough players to win the title, but do they have the team?

To answer that you have to ask yourself, what is Roberto Mancini's best side? It is impossible to tell now with injuries and new players at different levels of form and fitness after a World Cup summer. But in a month or two the hierarchy will begin to take shape and, providing City are still in the hunt come next spring, a first XI will emerge.

Every manager in charge of a big expensive squad likes to say there is no such thing as a first-choice XI but one exists at every club. On Monday night, Mancini pointed to the proximity of tomorrow's Europa League match against Timisoara as evidence that he has to rotate his players. It is a convenient way for a manager to protect the egos in their squad from bruising. But look at the sides picked towards the end of last season by Sir Alex Ferguson at Manchester United or Chelsea's Carlo Ancelotti and you will see that a first XI emerged, however much the managers denied it.

Nigel de Jong conceded as much yesterday when he said that he had noticed the difference in the club. "There is no doubt that the intensity has upped in training with the arrival of the new players," he said. "Everyone is working and fighting for each other. There are lots of positive things in this team. You have to raise your game when players like we have signed come into the group but it is not just them, it is younger ones too pushing from underneath."

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Pupils at independent schools are three times more likely to gain the A* grade as those in comprehensive schools, yesterday's A-level results revealed. The finding prompted the Schools Minister, Nick Gibb, to warn that the school system was "one of the most segregated in the world".

The new grade, introduced this year, was awarded for 8.1 per cent of scripts, stirring memories of the 1960s, when 8.5 per cent were given an A grade. As one education expert put it: "A* is the new A grade."

Teachers' leaders warned that the new grade would hamper state school pupils' chances of getting into Britain's top universities. The figures showed that 17.9 per cent of all independent school entries were awarded an A*, compared with just 5.8 per cent of entries from comprehensive schools. In state grammar schools, 12.5 per cent of entries were given an A* grade.

John Bangs, head of education at the National Union of Teachers, described the A* grade as "a belt and braces filter for the Russell Group [the group representing 20 of the country's leading higher education research institutions, including Oxford and Cambridge] to select their candidates.

"All this is going to achieve is independent pupils succeeding in getting places against state school pupils – and that's something of massive concern."

Education experts have said independent schools are stealing a march by offering more coaching for the A* grade. Mr Gibb said the Government was anxious to improve social mobility by adopting policies like the "pupil premium" – giving schools more cash to take in disadvantaged pupils.

Overall, this year's A-levels saw an overall 0.3 percentage point rise in the percentage of A grades awarded – from 26.7 per cent to 27 per cent. The overall pass rate rose by 0.1 percentage points to 97.6 per cent. It is the 28th year in succession that the figure has risen.

Boys have narrowed the gap between them and girls this year from 2 percentage points to 1.8 percentage points at A grade and from 1.1 to 0.9 in the overall pass rate.

Professor Alan Smithers, head of the Centre for Education and Employment at Buckingham University, had said this would be a result of reforms which had introduced more open-ended questions designed to tease out critical thinking skills. Girls still outscored boys in the top grade, 8.3 per cent gaining an A*, compared to 7.9 per cent of boys.

This year's results saw a further decline in the take-up of modern foreign languages – with a further 3.76 percentage point drop in the take-up of German to 5,548 and a 3.37 percentage point drop in French to 13, 850.

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