He’d developed a strangely tender feeling towards such words, as if they were children abandoned in the woods and it was his duty to rescue them.

When I was 16, I started publishing all kinds of things in school magazines.

Why is it he feels some line has been crossed, some boundary transgressed? How much is too much, how far is too far?

Never pray for justice, because you might get some.

You can mean more than one. You can mean thousands. I'm not in any immediate danger, I'll say to you. I'll pretend you can hear me. But it's no good, because I know you can't.

Hope drives us to invent new fixes for old messes, which in turn create ever more dangerous messes. Hope elects the politician with the biggest empty promise; and as any stockbroker or lottery seller knows, most of us will take a slim hope over prudent and predictable frugality. Hope, like greed, fuels the engine of capitalism.

You hear doom and gloom about the Internet ruining young people's command of English - that's nonsense.