I like texting as much as the next kidult - and embrace it as yet more evidence, along with email, that we live now in the post-aural age, when an unsolicited phone call is, thankfully, becoming more and more understood to be an unspeakable social solecism, tantamount to an impertinent invasion of privacy.

The great liberty of the fictional writer is to let the imagination out of the traces and see it gallop off over the horizon.

Live life and write about life. Of the making of many books there is indeed no end, but there are more than enough books about books.

Political activists of all stripes are usually a wacky bunch, and never more so than in a system like Britain's, where power is effected via the quiescence of the electorate as much as its convictions.

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

In survey after survey, people report that the greatest dangers they face are, in this order: terrorist attack, plane crashes and nuclear accidents. This despite the fact that these three combined have killed fewer people in the past half-century than car accidents do in any given year.

Drug use and procrastination often go hand in tourniquet.