[F]or the most part football these days is the opium of the people, not to speak of their crack cocaine. Its icon is the impeccably Tory, slavishly conformist Beckham. The Reds are no longer the Bolsheviks. Nobody serious about political change can shirk the fact that the game has to be abolished. And any political outfit that tried it on would have about as much chance of power as the chief executive of BP has in taking over from Oprah Winfrey.

Today, nostalgia is almost as unacceptable as racism.

It is silly to call fat people "gravitationally challenged", a self-righteous fetishism of language which is no more than a symptom of political frustration.

After all, if you do not resist the apparently inevitable, you will never know how inevitable the inevitable was.

In the deep night of metaphysics, all cats look black.

Successful revolutions are those which end up by erasing all traces of themselves.

Americans use the word "dream" as often as psychoanalysts do.