Brain power improves by brain use, just as our bodily strength grows with exercise. And there is no doubt that a large proportion of the female population, from school days to late middle age, now have very complicated lives indeed.

When Christians start thinking about Jesus, things start breaking down, they lose their faith. It's perfectly possible to go to church every Sunday and not ask any questions, just because you like it as a way of life. They fear that if they ask questions they'll lose their Christ, the very linchpin of their religion.

I don't think you can tell the objective truth about a person. That's why people write novels.

Watching a whole cluster of friends, and my own mother, die over quite a short space of time convinced me that purely materialist 'explanations' for our mysterious human existence simply won't do - on an intellectual level.

That was the miracle of Abraham Lincoln, politician. He pursued the high purpose of moving justice forward via the low arts of patronage and patronization. Indeed, in a democracy, it is usually the only way great deeds are done.

Richard Nixon is very much a self-made man in the six years prior to his emergence as a national figure. Between the moment he's elected to Congress in 1946 and the moment he's inaugurated as Vice President in 1953, he conducts nothing less than a kind of prodigy of American political self-advancement.

Without industry, finance and government consciously and collaboratively ensuring that capital flows to where it is needed in order to ensure the scaling up of climate change solutions, whatever deal is agreed risks never being realised.

Democracy not only requires equality but also an unshakable conviction in the value of each person, who is then equal.