As humourless a lump of dough as ever held a torchlight vigil outside the South African Embassy or stuck an AIDS awareness ribbon on an unwilling first-nighter.

Music takes me to places of illimitable sensual and insensate joy, accessing points of ecstasy that no angelic lover could ever locate, or plunging me into gibbering weeping hells of pain that no torturer could ever devise".

You've just had the most imponderable joy of watching charlieissocoollike, which makes you, like, cool.

History is not the story of strangers, aliens from another realm; it is the story of us had we been born a little earlier. History is memory; we have to remember what it is like to be a Roman, or a Jacobite or a Chartist or even - if we dare, and we should dare - a Nazi. History is not abstraction, it is the enemy of abstraction.

You can't reason yourself back into cheerfulness any more than you can reason yourself into an extra six inches in height.

There's no doubt that I do have extremes of mood that are greater than just about anybody else I know.

I was born Mary Patterson, but then I married and naturally took my husband's name, so now I'm Neil Patterson.