There is no right language or wrong language any more than there are right or wrong clothes.

Nowadays a lot of what was wrong with me would no doubt be ascribed to Attention Deficit Disorder, tartrazine food colouring, dairy produce and air pollution. A few hundred years earlier it would have been demons, still the best analogy I think, but not much help when it comes to a cure.

What other developed democracy has such a ridiculous and squalid history of intolerance? From the imprisonment and roasting of heretics, witches and poachers, to the censorship of literature, art and television: from St Alban through Wilde, Joyce and Lawrence I think we can point with pride to as grim a catalogue of intemperate, bigoted repression as any nation on earth.

To me, reason is as spiritual as anything else, the beauty of reason seems to me indelible and ineffable and numinous... the spirit is after all the same word we use to describe... essence

Lectures broke into one's day and were clearly a terrible waste of time, necessary no doubt if you were reading law or medicine or some other vocational subject, but in the case of English, the natural thing to do was talk a lot, listen to music, drink coffee and wine, read books, and go to plays, perhaps be in plays.

I may have looked happy but inside I was hopelessly depressed.

There can't be that many individual souls. Not souls like mine. There isn't room. There can't be.