That's emails for ya: sometimes they're like an arrow that hits so deep in the target, you can't pull it out.

Plutocracy.' It has a perfect nuance: chilly, inaccessible, icy-rich.

I've been a professional writer for 20 years, and there are contours in that time, crescents and troughs.

The thing is, when everyone is trying to persuade you that a thing you know to be true isn't actually true, you start to believe them: not because it is true but because it's easier. It's just the easy way out.

Perhaps living souls had greater phantom powers than the dead.

I have to get out once a week and speak with people or I start thinking I'm the emperor of Abyssinia.

It's just that to a lot of British people George Bush represents the worst of all things American. He's the right-wing Christian crusader, the toxic Texan who refused Kyoto, the poll-cheat eel who undermined democracy on the back of something called 'chads,' a notion we've never entirely grasped.