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.

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

Marx was wrong. Religion is not the opiate of the people. Opium suggests something soporific, numbing, dulling. Too often religion has been an aphrodisiac for horror, a Benzedrine for bestiality. At its best it has lifted spirits and raised spires. At its worst it has turned entire civilizations into cemeteries.

Today, words. Tomorrow, sticks and stones. And the day after that?

The events of September 11 were carried out by people armed not with weapons of mass destruction, but with blades you can buy at a newsagent

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.