There are no young people who know how to debate, who know how to vote, and who know how to persuade people to vote. And you have seen this in Paraguay and they are reaping the harvest now of fifty years of dictatorship.

There are 60 million of us [britains] crammed into an area the size of a state. So you don't have that feeling of remoteness at all, ever. And that's reflected in the way our media works, and so on.

I want people to laugh with me and Paraguay and Newfoundland, but I don't want to laugh at them. I hope in my books at the end of the day you come across with the impression that I really admire both of these places.

This terrible frustration that we so often feel in the West in not being able to articulate and express ourselves.

The noise that we can expect in the future will only increase and we'll be wishing for rural Portugal or something like that.

People my age and younger do think much more towards Europe. We have to fill the gap sometime - we can't think we are an empire any longer after all.

In both places [Paraguay and Newfoundland] people rise despite everything - both are pretty tough environments.