The most intense hatreds are not between political parties but within them.

While sticks and stones break bones, words can never hurt? Manifestly untrue. Politics everywhere are holistic, interconnected, and the rhetoric of right or left can produce toxic atmospheres in which lunacy thrives.

The book can produce an addiction as fierce as heroin or nicotine, forcing us to spend much of our lives, like junkies, in book shops and libraries, those literary counterparts to the opium den.

Sport provides the spectacle, the metaphor, the religious ritual, the putty to fill the cracks in countless lives.

Advertising men and politicians are dangerous if they are separated. Together they are diabolical.

Unless you are willing to try, fail miserable, and try again, success won't happen.

Fame often comes to those who are thinking about something else, whereas celebrity comes to those who think about nothing else. Celebrity is, if you like, a forgery of fame: it has the form but lacks the content.