Humans lived for several million years as fully wild beings: only in the last 10, 000 did we invent agriculture; only in the last couple of centuries did we invent industry. We are a species that has spent 99 per cent of its history as hunter-gatherers. We haven't had time for our unconscious minds and our unconscious needs to have changed. If you like, our souls have not changed, and this is true whether or not we believe that we have them.

Nature is not horrible. Nature is not wonderful. Nature is not cruel. Nature is not beautiful. Nature only is.

What politician ever thinks beyond 4 or 5 years? But such thinking is hopelessly inadequate for the big questions that involve the fabric of the world we live in

Sport is something that does not matter, but is performed as if it did. In that contradiction lies its beauty

It is a truism that no row is ever about what it is about.

A living countryside is not a luxury but a necessity for the human population; if you let conservation go hang until your pockets are jingling there will be a lot less to conserve

The combination of an out-of-control tabloid press and a readership that thrills to the destruction of the England head coach is something no other country can offer. Scolari was driven out; Steve McClaren's personal life made the front pages. Neither of them even held the job. Then there was the fake-sheikhing of Sven-Göran Eriksson. That a newspaper should so brilliantly and deliberately destabilise the national head coach in a World Cup year is something no other sporting nation would consider.