One side-effect of the so-called war on terror has been a crisis of liberalism. This is not only a question of alarmingly illiberal legislation, but a more general problem of how the liberal state deals with its anti-liberal enemies.

Historical determinism is a recipe for political quietism.

You've got to have a sense of different audiences. I'm a kind of performer manque - I come from a long line of failed actors!

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

Deconstruction insists not that truth is illusory but that it is institutional.

In the end, it is because the media are driven by the power and wealth of private individuals that they turn private lives into public spectacles. If every private life is now potentially public property, it is because private property has undermined public responsibility.

Men and women do not easily submit to a power that does not weave itself into the texture of their daily existence - one reason why culture remains so politically vital. Civilisation cannot get on with culture, and it cannot get on without it.