Great art has dreadful manners. The greatest paintings grab you in a headlock, rough up your composure, and then proceed in short order to re-arrange your reality.

The older I get, the more I want to do. It beats death, decay or golf in unfortunate trousers. Peace and quiet depress me.

We seem wired to grieve with greenery. Allowing the dead to dissolve into the earth, to become part of the cycle of the seasons, has, for millennia, held the promise of cheating mortality.

I felt New York was a big, more stylish, more metropolitan Golders Green. I was thrilled.

The next worse thing to a battle lost is a battle won.

But it struck me that the extreme violence and cruelty of the English Civil War had gone understated.

Even for the most excitable preacher, there was nothing inherently sinful about a waffle.