Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi looks in the mirror and sees a playboy of the old school. And men such as Dominique Strauss-Kahn, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Charlie Sheen no doubt look at Berlusconi and think, 'Role model!' Women, of course, know otherwise. They see him as an aging, pathetic buffoon.

Where past generations had film cameras, scrapbooks, notebooks, and that part of the brain which stores memories, we now have a smartphone app for every conceivable recording need. The thing is, all that time you spend logging and then curating the quotidian aspects of your daily life is time taken away from actually doing things.

It could fairly be said that America, during the Bush years, has entered an Age of Denial - arguably the first stage of a nation's decline.

I might wear a dinner jacket once a year to our Oscar party - that's a big thing - but I don't go to parties. I'm social but I'm not a socialite person.

Whatever age we are is the age we’ve always been.

Cod is more responsible for the discovery of the New World than almost anything else. Drove the Vikings across the North Atlantic, and John Cabot discovered America by looking for cod.

Memory is often - perhaps usually - a distorting lens: what we think we remember isn't the way it was at all. It's what we'd like to remember.