Abstinence is a window of clarity through which one can better find one's work and one's mate.

Religious hatreds tend to be merciless and absolute.

The busybodies have begun to infect American society with a nasty intolerance - a zeal to police the private lives of others and hammer them into standard forms - A Nation of Finger Pointers.

The television anchorman Dan Rather turns up in rag-top native drag in Afghanistan, the surrogate of our culture with his camera crew, intrepid as Sir Richard Burton sneaking into Mecca.

Africa has a genious for extremes, for the beginning and the end. It seems simultaneously connected to some memory of Eden and to some foretaste of apocalypse. Nowhere is day more vivid or night darker. Nowhere are forests more luxuriant. Nowhere is there a continent more miserable

Would it be anything like a literary disaster if Gore Vidal were to fall silent? Easy. No. In fact, there is something to be said for the idea.

Human ingenuity has given centuries to the goal of ensuring that the human body might move around at an even 68 degrees all year.