As a precocious teen I dreamed of being Graham Greene. Well, as it turned out, I never wrote a great novel, sadly, and I never converted to Catholicism, happily, but I did do one thing he did. That is, in middle age I moved to a seaside town and got into a right barney with the local powers-that-be.

When the sex war is won prostitutes should be shot as collaborators for their terrible betrayal of all women.

What men don't want, in fact what anyone who's any sort of thrill-seeking, intelligent adult doesn't want, is some crushing bore describing their emotions in real time every waking hour.

People - and I include myself - get fat because they choose pleasure over self-denial.

The truth of the matter is, beauty is a specific thing, rare and fleeting. Some of us have it in our teens, 20s and 30s and then lose it; most of us have it not at all. And that's perfectly okay. But lying to yourself that you have it when you don't seems to me simple-minded at best and psychotic at worst.

Here in Barcelona, it's the architects who built the buildings that made the city iconic who are the objects of admiration - not a bunch of half-witted monarchs.

Feminism seeks to turn the biggest, bloodiest carnivore in the world - passion - into a right-on cud-chewing vegan. It can never work. Sex was never meant to be that way. Sex, on the whole, was meant to be short, nasty and brutish. If what you want is cuddling, you should buy a puppy.