I've been to Uganda and to North Korea and to Eritrea, countless horror spots around the world.

One of the reasons I decided to apply for American citizenship after something like a quarter of century of living here on a British, European Union passport and a green card, was my identification with the United States in the post-September 11th period.

A sure sign of ineptitude and malice is manifested when one's attacker is willing to cover himself with mud in order to try and make some of it adhere to his target.

We have millions and millions of North Korean children totally stunted in mind and body and will have to be dealt with at some point, who have been raised to believe that they live in a regime that is run by a god.

America was not interventionist enough, which, of course, did mean a bit of a breach with old comrades on the left. I felt the international left in the countries concerned took the same position as I did. So, in my view, it's the left that's become reactionary and isolationist and parochial.

As the many male victims of rape in the regime's disgusting jails can testify, this state-run pathology of sexual repression and sexual sadism is not content to degrade women only.

By trying to adjust to the findings that it once tried so viciously to ban and repress, religion has only succeeded in restating the same questions that undermined it in earlier epochs. What kind of designer or creator is so wasteful and capricious and approximate? What kind of designer or creator is so cruel and indifferent? And - most of all - what kind of designer or creator only chooses to "reveal" himself to semi-stupefied peasants in desert regions?