“ Rolf Ekeus came round to my apartment one day and showed me the name of the Iraqi diplomat who had visited the little West African country of Niger: a statelet famous only for its production of yellow… Christopher Hitchens
“ When you're a kid, they tell you it's all... grow up. Get a job. Get married. Get a house. Have a kid, and that's it. But the truth is, the world is so much stranger than that. It's so much darker. An… Elton Pope
“ I just took [my cancer diagnosis] as bad luck, basically. It did strike me almost immediately, my atheist sort of thing kicked in and I thought "ha, if I was a God-botherer, I'd be thinking, why me Go… Iain M. Banks
“ Seriousness is no more a guarantee of truth, insight, authenticity or probity, than humour is a guarantee of superficiality and stupidity. Stephen Fry
“ She will listen to BBC radio and hear the accounts of the deaths and the riots - religious with undertones of ethnic tension the voice will say. And she will fling the radio to the wall and a fierce r… Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
“ I thought I was getting away from politics for a while. But I now realise that the vuvuzela is to these World Cup blogs what Julius Malema is to my politics columns: a noisy, but sadly unavoidable irr… Richard Calland