“My guess is that good and bad parenting is spread fairly evenly across different social groups. But can you imagine Tony Blair lecturing the middle class on how to bring up their children? He is fa...”

“In my experience (I am the lone father of an eight-year-old boy who lost his mother when he was one year old), parenting is the most difficult of all jobs: forget your chief executives, editors, pr...”

“Marx and Engels are arguably history's most famous couple. Such was the closeness of their collaboration that it is not always easy to recall which works bore both names, which just that of Marx, a...”

“The fact that hardly anyone is ever prepared to admit to racist behaviour is perhaps a sort of strength: it speaks to the fact that racism is socially inadmissible.”

“If the Age of Sport has been all champagne and roses hitherto, then expect our love affair with its newly-acquired prominence to become increasingly tainted by scandals about cheating. Sport is los...”

“The two ethnic groups that remain fundamentally different from the Han Chinese - in terms of history, culture, language, religion and physical appearance - are the Uighurs and Tibetans. In these tw...”

“It is better to be hated for what you are than to be loved for what you are not.”

“If I am going to be drownedif I am going to be drownedif I am going to be drowned, why, in the name of the seven mad gods who rule the sea, was I allowed to come thus far and contemplate sand and t...”

“I'm an Earth ecstatic, and my creed is simple: All life is sacred, life loves life, and we are capable of improving our behavior toward one another. As basic as that is, for me it's also tonic and ...”

“For the two of us, home isn't a place. It is a person. And we are finally home.”

“The vast and beautiful world is the home we share together.”

“I stood there a long while, staring at that tree. It looked so strongSo beautiful. Hurt right down the middleBut alive and well. Cee touched my shoulderLightly. Frank? Yes? Come on, brother. Let's ...”

“The land of easy mathematics where he who works adds up and he who retires subtracts.”

“At the age of 45, most days in Tucson were spent feeling like I was on the summit of Mauna Kea, as I was exhibiting debilitating health symptoms that corresponded to what I saw at very high altitud...”

“The hour is only long thus, if you've waited.”