South Dakota... is like the world's first drive-through sensory deprivation chamber.

I can't fix the world. If you want to make a difference in life, you have to direct your energies in a focused way.

Perhaps it's my natural pessimism, but it seems that an awfully large part of travel these days is to see things while you still can.

I turned to my own bunk and examined it with a kind of appalled fascination. If the mattress stains were anything to go by, a previous user had not so much suffered from incontinence as rejoiced in it. He had evidently included the pillow in his celebrations.

I had spent the whole of my savings ... on a suit for the wedding - a remarkable piece of apparel with lapels that had been modelled on the tail fins of a 1957 Coupe de Ville and trousers so copiously flared that when I walked you didn't see my legs move.

At a conference of sociologists in America in 1977, love was defined as "the cognitive-affective state characterized by intrusive and obsessive fantasizing concerning reciprocity of amorant feelings by the object of the amorance." That is jargon - the practice of never calling a spade a spade when you might instead call it a manual earth-restructuring implement - and it is one of the great curses of modern English.

Making English grammar conform to Latin rules is like asking people to play baseball using the rules of football.