We tell ourselves that God is dead, when what we mean is that God is Dad, and we wish him dead.

History does not eliminate grievances. It lays them down like landmines.

My kind publishers, Toby Mundy and Margaret Stead of Atlantic Books, have commissioned me to write the life of Queen Victoria.

I should prefer to have a politician who regularly went to a massage parlour than one who promised a laptop computer for every teacher.

The fact that logic cannot satisfy us awakens an almost insatiable hunger for the irrational.

I think I became a Catholic to annoy my father.

We cannot hope for a society in which formal organized religion dies out. But we can stop behaving as if it was worthy of our collective respect.