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

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

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 old dead trees are the most fascinating - the countless trees lying in the gullies and up the hills that fell perhaps a century ago, pulling up their roots from the earth as they toppled. The great upheavals left rocks in their huge tentacles and, as they slowly rot, the trunks are home to populations of creatures, from goannas to wild pigs. As grey as tombstones in a cemetery they lie there, having outlasted generations of farmers, as they'll outlast me. In their own way they are as beautiful, more beautiful, than living trees.

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

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.

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