You need a long hard day's work to reveal the logic of the craving for very bad tv and alcohol.

It seems that most of us could benefit from a brush with a near-fatal disaster to help us recognise the important things that we are too defeated or embittered to recognise from day to day.

The problem isn't so much finding good ideas (there is no shortage) as embedding the ones we have into everyday practice.

Good books put a finger on emotions that are deeply our own - but that we could never have described on our own.

In a secularising world, art has replaced religion as a touchstone of our reverence and devotion.

Nowhere was the airport's charm more concentrated than on the screens placed at intervals across the terminal which announced, in deliberately workmanlike fonts, the itineraries of aircraft about to take to the skies. These screens implied a feeling of infinite and immediate possibility: they suggested the ease with which we might impulsively approach a ticket desk and, within a few hours, embark for a country where the call to prayer rang out over shuttered whitewashed houses, where we understood nothing of the language and where no one knew our identities.

The most attractive are not those who allow us to kiss them at once [we soon feel ungrateful] or those who never allow us to kiss them [we soon forget them], but those who coyly lead us between the two extremes.