We are also further than ever from equality of opportunity.

I hate churches, all of them. But they used to know something about the importance of silence.

For all its terrible faults, in one sense America is still the last, best hope of mankind, because it spells out so vividly the kind of happiness that most people actually want, regardless of what they are told they ought to want.

According to Richard Clarke, the former White House counterterrorism chief, Bush was so obsessed with Iraq that he failed to take action against Osama Bin Laden despite repeated warnings from his intelligence experts.

Francis Wheen takes a hugely enjoyable sweep through the tangled thickets of superstition and gullibility in which modern man likes to ramble. He takes particular delight in reminding us how easily fools are parted from their money and how many of them there are.

The president is being denounced for not taking the kind of pre-emptive action in Afghanistan that he has been so passionately denounced for taking in Iraq. Damned if he does and damned if he doesn't.

It's true that I'm taking a break from writing a regular column to do other things but it's got nothing to do with what dear Simon has or has not written.