The point of a library's existence is not persuasion or evangelism, but knowledge. It is irrelevant to the good library whether, as an institution, it shares or promotes your core values or mine, or the Attorney General's or Saddam Hussein's. The library is always an instrument of choice, and the choice is always yours, not your elected or designated leaders.

An ideal museum show would be a mating of Brideshead Revisited with House & Garden, provoking intense and pleasurable nostalgia for a past that none of its audience has had.

Now that rates are moving up, we're seeing more aggressive offerings from banks.

We have entered a period of intolerance which combines, as it sometimes does in America, with a sugary taste for euphemism.

In America, nostalgia for things is apt to set in before they go.

We want to create a sort of linguistic Lourdes, where evil and misfortune are dispelled by a dip in the waters of euphemism

It is an oldish question, but not perhaps a very interesting one, whether cooking is an art or not.