It is far easier to explain to a three-year-old how babies are made than to explain the processes whereby bread or sugar appear on the table.

hatred, however apparently justifiable, excusable or inevitable, always damages the hater.

the sudden violent dispossession accompanying a refugee flight is much more than the loss of a permanent home and a traditional occupation, or than the parting from close friends and familiar places. It is also the death of the person one has become in a particular context, and every refugee must be his or her own midwife at the painful process of rebirth.

I wonder if those experts who tell us that our sexual appetite is the strongest know what real thirst feels like; I can imagine the desire for water driving someone to commit a crime to which sexual desire could never drive them.

Sunnis consider Shias a pack of unwholesome fanatics and Shias consider Sunnis a gang of lukewarm no-goods - there's nothing like religion for spreading brotherly love!

one of the advantages of cycling is that it automatically prevents a journey from becoming an Expedition.

apartheid still hangs in the air like a poisonous cloud left over from chemical warfare.