Like all right-listening folk, I am an implacable enemy of all muzak.

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

If we bought everything on the Internet, our eyes and mouths and nostrils would probably begin to film over with a tegument - one initially tissue-thin and capable of being removed each morning, but which gradually thickened and hardened until we were imprisoned in our own tiny minds.

One of the most heartening phenomena in today's Britain is the great diversity of the modern nerd - the nerd is out and proud, and while she may love 'Buffy the Vampire Slayer' merchandise more than is strictly warranted, she is in every way to be cherished as an exemplar of cosmopolitanism and tolerance.

Sometimes the crowd is the madness - at others it's the absence of the crowd that is.

I think the fundamental apprehension is that the city's an organism of some form, rather than being governed from above.

As for critical writing about modernism, its moments of lucidity are but fulgurations illuminating the dark and incomprehensible landscape of its subject's unabashed difficulty.