Islam, Christianity and Judaism all define themselves through disgust of women's bodies.

How do you make any sense of history, art or literature without knowing the stories and iconography of your own culture and all the world's main religions?

One in six people suffer depression or a chronic anxiety disorder. These are not the worried well but those in severe mental pain with conditions crippling enough to prevent them living normal lives.

So what really works? Treatments in jail do some good, but it's mostly too late: finding a family and a job or just growing older make most prisoners eventually give up crime.

There is all the difference in the world between teaching children about religion and handing them over to be taught by the religious.

The strongest predictor of unhappiness is anyone who has had a mental illness in the last 10 years. It is an even stronger predictor of unhappiness than poverty - which also ranks highly.

This is indeed a clash of civilisations, not between Islam and Christendom but between reason and superstition.

Most people come to fear not death itself, but the many terrible ways of dying.

Crime is only the worst example, but it is a paradigm for other Labour policy disasters. No one tells the voters that crime is falling: let them stay scared senseless.

Thresholds of pain, indignity and incapacity are entirely personal.

But the single overwhelming reason why jails are bursting is longer sentences given for more crimes.

You stumble upon an unhappy Martian sentry on a mission and shoot ineffectually at his powersuit a few times before he pulps you with his laserbeam eyes and hideous poisonous-gas breath. Glory!

This is a difficult balance, telling the truth: how much to share, how much to keep, which truths will wound but not ruin, which will cut too deep to heal.

Neal! It's your grief counselors. We're here to hug!

Of course he loves me. I’m his sister.” “Blood isn’t love,” said Magnus, and his voice was bitter.

I know in London a Welsh hairdresser who has striven so vehemently to abolish his accent that he sounds like a man speaking with the Elgin marbles in his mouth.

I am an unspeakable of the Oscar Wilde sort.

There is a great correlation between music and images.

Racism is a form of insanity. Human beings became racist when they started talking. Speech has a lot to do with it.

Never turn back to see the result of what you have done. Give all to the Lord and go on, and think not of it.

I've said what I'm prepared to say in my poems, and then journalists think that you're going to tell them a whole lot more.