The shortlist included rock group Queen's 'We are the Champions' and 'Bohemian Rhapsody'; 'All You Need is Love' (The Beatles); 'Imagine' (John Lennon); 'Millennium' (Robbie Williams); 'Don't Look Back in Anger' (Oasis); 'Disco 2000' (Pulp), and 'It's Only Rock and Roll' (The Rolling Stones). The list made an interesting epitaph for the last 1,000 years, ranging from Robbie Williams's pessimism - 'We got stars directing our fate' and Lennon's bleak homilies - 'Imagine there's no heaven, it's easy if you try', to the music of Queen, described by critic Rosie Lane as 'an optimistic and truly British anthem in every sense'. I suppose that looking at the current headlines - everything from Chechnya to Gary Glitter - I would have to go along with Williams and Lennon, if I didn't have other points of reference. In the end, 'All You Need is Love' filled the vast spaces of the Dome, and as a secular anthem for a secular age it could have been worse. While it was all going on, somebody stole a Cezanne from the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford; there's probably a moral there somewhere.