The high arts of literature and music stand in a curious relationship to one another, at once securely comfortable and deeply uneasy - rather like a long-term marriage.

As the render is to the building, and the blueprint to the machine, so sport is to social existence.

Without a shadow of doubt, Trafalgar Square has to be one of the most crap urban public spaces in the world.

It is not that sport, over-indulged in, coarsens the mind; it is that it dulls it.

I enjoy doing very high mileages, partly out of masochism and also because I like to feel the shape of the landscape.

That tertiary education is under a sustained assault by a political and - it often seems - social consensus that equates all education with training for increased productivity, only makes academe a still more promising environment for a contrarian.

Modernism has a reputation for being a forbidding phenomenon: its visual arts disconcertingly non-representational, its literary efforts devoid of the consolations of plot and character - even its films, it's argued, fall well short of that true desideratum: entertainment.