Zitat des Tages von Simon Hoggart:
Watching the Commons tribute to Margaret Thatcher was like being suffocated inside a gigantic sticky toffee pudding, but one with nasty bogeys planted inside. There was much of the 'Margaret Thatcher who was lucky enough to know me,' especially from her own side of the House.
What has always puzzled me is the flexibility of God's word. For instance, Catholics can now eat meat on Fridays. And limbo has been abolished. How does this work? Who tells them?
During my own gap year, I learned an invaluable lesson - that I was a lousy teacher. Even though the children I 'taught,' in upcountry Uganda, were desperate for qualifications, they largely ignored me. Until, that is, I realised that they wanted to hear about other young persons around the world.
I know of no wars started by anyone to impose lack of religion on someone else. We have lethal Sunni v Shia, Catholic against Protestant, but no agnostic suicide bombers attack crowded atheist pubs.
Americans are fascinated by their own love of shopping. This does not make them unique. It's just that they have more to buy than most other people on the planet. And it's also an affirmation of faith in their country.
Poor Harper Seven Beckham, having to live with that name all her life. It's the Boy Named Sue syndrome; at the very least it will toughen her up.
The formal Washington dinner party has all the spontaneity of a Japanese imperial funeral.
A married vicar is likely to regard his vocation as a job - a tough and ill-paid one, to be sure - but a priest is seen as a pillar of the community, answerable only to his parishioners and his God, rather than to a wife and children.
There are few tribes more loathsome than the American Right, and their vicious use of the shortcomings in the NHS to attack Barack Obama's attempts at health reform are a useful reminder.
Living in New York is like being at some terrible late-night party. You're tired, you've had a headache since you arrived, but you can't leave because then you'd miss the party.
Kind 'Guardian' readers have been forwarding me round robin Christmas newsletters for years now: lengthy missives full of perfect children, exotic holidays, talented pets and endless, tedious detail. The notes that accompanied them revealed they had inspired in the original recipients everything from mild irritation to absolute rage.
She is the first head of government in history to give a whole country its second childhood.
I've served on five different juries, and many of them were bonkers in their own way.
Even I would find a book about my life pretty dull.
In Washington, success is just a training course for failure.
When you visit a foreign city you are in it, but not of it, separated by a glass wall. Once, while a student, I was getting dressed in my ground-floor room when a family of Italians crossed the grass to watch, as if I were laid on for their amusement and instruction.
All over the U.S. there are people whose lives are being destroyed for lack of proper health care provision, and there is no sight more odious than the rich, powerful and arrogant trying to keep it that way.
The Tory party is like a rugby union match in which all 30 players are wearing the same strip. They're not sure who they are grabbing round the knees, but they're having a lot of fun doing it.
My colleague Bill Keegan has written a very short book ('Saving the World?') on an unlikely topic - he is the first economist to try to rehabilitate Gordon Brown.
Denis Healey refused to contribute an article to the 'Guardian' about his intentions, and was punished by the electorate - and then all Labour MPs - for his presumption in assuming they already knew everything about him. He became famously the best prime minister we never had. Perhaps.
Life was so much simpler in pre-video days when everyone refused invitations because the 'Forsyte Saga' was on. Now we all just have a long list of unwatched shows, all of which, it seems, our friends are raving about. I feel as outdated as if I wore a Fair Isle sweater, ate Pot Noodle and had a two-bar electric fire in the sitting room.
When I was collecting material for a political gossip column, and someone said something interesting, I would wait for them to add, 'and I don't want to read that in your magazine!' In which case I wouldn't use it. But if they didn't remember to say it, I'd nip off to the loo, write the story up, come back and change the subject.
If you read the 'Daily Mail,' you would imagine that the British middle classes lead lives of unremitting misery.
