'Reality' is a notion that journalists take for granted.

A good nationalism has to depend on a principle of the common people, on myths of a struggling commonality.

Traveling alone offers the chance to test the limits of what you think you know about yourself.

We do not read to pass the time, but to inhabit time.

Once upon a time, I thought that politics was the name we gave to our higher instincts. That was before Margaret Thatcher, who came to power when I was 11 years old.

The idea that people in novels should be more sympathetic than people in life simply baffles me.

Fans of football and fans of nationhood have a similar zeal. Read the fanzines: their contributors could find a needle-sized diss in a haystack of compliments, and their passions are fundamentalist.