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.

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.

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

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

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.