Most people can do extraordinary things if they have the confidence or take the risks. Yet most people

To many people holidays are not voyages of discovery, but a ritual of reassurance.

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.

Let the massacres remind us to turn down our political volume and venom.

It's a privilege to present 'Late Night Live'. No radio program, anywhere on Earth, casts a wider net.

Later, in a different home, I befriended a eucalypt, using a resilient bough as a trampoline. Learning nothing from having plummeted from the peppercorn, I'd bounce happily in my haven in the heavens. I loved that tree - and fully understand why Heysen, Roberts, McCubbin and the rest devoted so much time and effort to painting arboreal portraits.