Reading the play at home, however fulfilling, can never be the vivacious experience that Shakespeare intended.

If you want to be happy for a short time, get drunk happy for a long time, fall in love; happy forever, take up gardening.

Comedy ages quicker than tragedy, to the extent that we can't know if the 10 commandments may originally have been 10 hilarious one-liners.

I read 'Crime and Punishment' years ago and don't recall the details of it, but I do retain a strong sense of the creeping paranoia and panic.

Global warming, the ongoing destruction of the planet, Third World debt, the uselessness of the railways, the takeover by the corporations, the scary George Bush person: all these things are important and should be animating me into outrage. Yet somehow they do not.

It was Julie Burchill who decreed that, beyond a certain age, a man should not be seen in a leather jacket.

The real change that paintings undergo is in the perceptions of the viewer.