It’s true – ask anyone from the 1570s what the big news of the day was and they’ll tell you it was Sir Walter Raleigh crawling round Camden on his hands and knees all shitfaced on Ketamine with a crazy Marge Simpson wig balanced precariously on top of his head. That’s why Amy Winehouse and Sir Walter Raleigh are so alike.

Oh, and also there’s a Cambridge University English paper asking students to compare Amy Winehouse’s lyrics to As You Came from the Holy Land by Sir Walter Raleigh. Students, here’s a clue – the one that breaks off in the middle to shout “Blakey! My BLAAAAAAAKE!” at nobody in particular probably isn’t Sir Walter Raleigh.

This is turning out to be quite a good week for rock stars in education. First Paul McCartney gets given a Yale doctorate because he wrote Yellow Submarine, and now it turns out that Cambridge University – one of the most prestigious centres of education in the country – is testing its students on what they think of Amy Winehouse.

We should probably point out that the Cambridge exam isn’t about what students think of Amy Winehouse as a person, because if that were the case then anyone who could write ‘Jesus Christ my eyes my eyes no my eyes oh God no’ would end up with first class honours. Instead it’s about Amy Winehouse’s lyrics.

Yes, Amy Winehouse does have lyrics. If you’ve seen Amy Winehouse perform live over the last 12 months you might just think that she just freestyles the sound of a cat getting its tail caught in a waste disposal unit over a Bontempi keyboard’s ‘horn-drenched retro soul’ preset, but you’re wrong.

Amy Winehouse has won Ivor Novello awards and Grammys and Brit awards all over the shop – and if a smug group of self-interested culturally bankrupt music industry insiders think she’s decent, then why shouldn’t the British educational system? BBC News explains in greater detail:

English students at Cambridge University have been asked to analyse lyrics by singer Amy Winehouse in a final-year exam. They were told to compare Winehouse’s Love is a Losing Game to songs by Bob Dylan, Billie Holiday and 16th century explorer Sir Walter Raleigh. They were asked to contrast aspects of the pop song with Bob Dylan’s Boots Of Spanish Leather, Billie Holiday’s Fine And Mellow and Sir Walter Raleigh’s As You Came from the Holy Land in an examination question.

It’s actually quite a hard task for the students to carry out. Firstly, you’ve got As You Came from the Holy Land by Sir Walter Raleigh – a stirring 16th century poem structured as a dialogue between a fearful lover and a pilgrim; and then you’ve got Love Is A Losing Game by Amy Winehouse – which is Amy Winehouse being all sad because she got hammered on crack and her boyfriend scarpered because he was probably scared of getting herpes. Or something. Easy.

But just because Amy Winehouse is figuring in Cambridge exams, it doesn’t mean that the standard of education in this country is dropping – if that was the truth then our recently completed 60,000 word PhD thesis entitled Chico Out Of X Factor: Haha He Did A Song With Some Kids And Everyone Danced LOL! wouldn’t be worth the paper it was written on.

And just to prove how quick to apologise he is, Robbie Williams has just said sorry to former Take That manager Nigel Martin Smith because he claimed in a song that Smith was a thief who stole funds from Take That's earnings when actually he wasn't. And it was one of the most heartfelt apologies we've ever heard, with a lawyer making a forced, court-ruled apology on behalf of Robbie Williams in his absence to a lawyer accepting the apology on behalf of Nigel Martin Smith in his absence in a courtroom. However, it's not all good news – if Robbie Williams is back in the news, does that mean he's famous again?

Does a falling tree make any sound if nobody is there to hear it? It's an important question, because we're in the middle of a similar, yet slightly updated, conundrum – if Robbie Williams libels you in an album that nobody buys, does it still count as libel?

Actually, it's not a conundrum at all, because it turns out that actually it is libel and if you take Robbie Williams to court for it there's a chance he'll end up paying you half a million quid and saying how sorry he is.

That's what's just happened to Nigel Martin Smith, anyway. You'll remember Nigel Martin Smith as the former manager of Take That, and the man who Robbie Williams has held a near-compulsive grudge against for over a decade. The grudge revealed itself most explicitly on a track called The 90's on Robbie Williams' latest album Rudebox, where Robbie apparently claimed that Martin Smith had stolen money from the band.

Whether this is true or not we just don't know – latest statistics show that Robbie Williams only actually sold one copy of Rudebox, and that was to his Mum, and she hasn't got round to listening to it yet. But even though Robbie Williams changed the lyrics to The 90's at the first sniff of trouble, Nigel Martin Smith still came after him.

And the case resolved itself this morning when Robbie Williams was ordered to pay Nigel Martin Smith an undisclosed sum of damages – thought to be somewhere around the £500,000 mark – and publicly apologise to him. Robbie Williams didn't do that himself – he stayed in LA where it's cheaper to work through 60 cigarettes, 36 double espressos, 20 cans of Red Bull and all sorts of Seroxat every day – but his lawyer did an awfully good job of apologising quite profusely:

"Robbie Williams wishes to make it clear to his fans, and the public at large, that he did not intend these lyrics to be taken at face value. Specifically, Robbie Williams did not intend to allege that Nigel Martin Smith has ever stolen any funds from Take That or anyone. Prior to the release of Rudebox, the lyrics to The 90's were changed by Robbie Williams in order to avoid any further misunderstanding. Nonetheless, Robbie Williams wishes now to apologise publicly and unreservedly for the distress that the original publication of those lyrics caused to Nigel."

And now that's all over, perhaps Robbie Williams and Nigel Martin Smith will be able to put their differences behind them and maybe even become friends. It's not like they have nothing in common, is it? Nigel Martin Smith and Robbie Williams are both northern, tubby and have their best work behind them – plus if two grown men can't bond over a deep resentment that Gary Barlow is more successful than they are, what can they bond over?

Read more:

Robbie Pays Dear For 'Outrageous' Lyrics – Sky