Teenage boys, goaded by their surging hormones run in packs like the primal horde. They have only a brief season of exhilarating liberty between control by their mothers and control by their wives.

There is no true expertise in the humanities without knowing all of the humanities. Art is a vast, ancient interconnected web-work, a fabricated tradition. Over-concentration on any one point is a distortion.

[On U.S. universities:] The bland leading the bland.

They do not understand the fragility of civilization and the constant nearness of savage nature.

As a major contemporary composer, Madonna should not let the eye dictate to the ear.

Our liberal, New York/Washington-based media would never in a million years put Liberal Godfather Ted Kennedy on the spot about his clan's bad behavior, to whose lurid history he himself has contributed so much.

I want a revamped feminism. Putting the vamp back means the lady must be a tramp. My generation of the Sixties rebels wanted to smash the bourgeois codes that had become authoritarian totems of the Fifties. The 'nice' girl with her soft, sanitized speech and decorous manners had to go. Thirty years later, we're still stuck with her - in the official spokesmen and the anointed heiresses of the feminist establishment.