The diet book is one of those fool-and-money separation devices that seems, like roulette or slot machines, never to lose its power.

Islam is at once the most and the least interesting of the world's monotheisms. It builds upon its primitive Jewish and Christian predecessors, selecting a chunk here and a shard there, and thus if these fall, it partly falls also.

We have known for a long time that Prince Charles' empty sails are so rigged as to be swelled by any passing waft or breeze of crankiness and cant. He fell for the fake anthropologist Laurens van der Post. He was bowled over by the charms of homeopathic medicine. He has been believably reported as saying that plants do better if you talk to them in a soothing and encouraging way

It would have been very alarming - morally, and in other ways too - if an attack of that nature, the 11 September attacks, had not aroused in us and in our governments and societies the spirit of self-defence. If that had not been one of the responses it seems to me there would have been very grave cause for concern.

I have decided to take whatever my disease can throw at me.

I have been taunting the Reaper into taking a free scythe in my direction and have now succumbed to something so predictable and banal that it bores even me.

A celebrity is well known for being well known. I'm relatively well known - but for what I've written and said, or so I fondly imagine.