If it is true that we need a degree of certainty to get by, it is also true that too much of the stuff can be lethal.

Dawkins considers that all faith is blind faith, and that Christian and Muslim children are brought up to believe unquestioningly. Not even the dim-witted clerics who knocked me about at grammar school thought that.

Works of art cannot save us. They can simply render us more sensitive to what needs to be repaired.

Capitalism will behave antisocially if it is profitable for it to do so, and that can now mean human devastation on an unimaginable scale. What used to be apocalyptic fantasy is today no more than sober realism.

The frontier between public and private shifts from time to time and culture to culture.

Postmodernism is among other things a sick joke at the expense of... revolutionary avant-gardism.

I liked early Amis a lot, but I stopped reading him some time ago. I admire Hitchens on literary topics - I think he is very astute. McEwan, I read a bit. But I suppose it's more the ideological phenomenon that they represent together that interests me.