We live in a society which salves its conscience more by helping the interestingly unfortunate than the dull deserving.

First-class travel, provided one hasn't to pay for it oneself, is the most insidiously addictive of life's luxuries.

Early this morning, 1 January 2021, three minutes after midnight, the last human being to be born on earth was killed in a pub brawl in a suburb of Buenos Aires, aged twenty-five years, two months and twelve days.

The world of the terminally ill is the world of neither the living nor the dead. I have watched others since I watched my father, and always with a sense of their strangeness. They sit and speak, and are spoken to, and listen, and even smile, but in spirit they have already moved away from us and there is no way we can enter their shadowy no-man’s-land.

Childhood is the one prison from which there's no escape, the one sentence from which there's no appeal. We all serve our time.

We who write in English are fortunate to have the richest and most versatile language in the world. Respect it.

the unforgivable was usually the most easily forgiven.