“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...”

“Stuart Hall was an utterly unique figure. Although he arrived at the age of 19 from Jamaica and spent the rest of his life here, he never felt at home in Britain. This juxtaposition was a crucial s...”

“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.”

“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...”

“Only once in your life, I truly believe, you find someone who can completely turn your world around. You tell them things that youve never shared with another soul and they absorb everything you sa...”

“As he read, I fell in love the way you fall asleep: slowly, and then all at once.”

“I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where. I love you simply, without problems or pride: I love you in this way because I do not know any other way of loving but this, in which there i...”

“There was something rather blousy about roses in full bloom, something shallow and raucous, like women with untidy hair”

“A vampire is like a Rose. They are beautiful, yet harmful.”

“Despite the weight of the world on my shoulders, the temptation to stop and smell the supernatural roses tugged on my sleeves a time or two.”

“Rather than the strength it takes to not lose, it's the strength to stand back up after a loss that is sometimes more valuable.”

“You need to be my wife to win with me.”

“Look yourself... staring into the monitor... and your time is going to be lost like that...First secondsSecond minutesThird hours”