Here's my gift-giving rule: Respect your current financial situation.

I should like to repeat what I stated recently in the Jeddah Economic Forum in Saudi Arabia: It won't be the religion but rather the world-view of some of its followers that shall be made current.

If my career continues along its current arc people will probably look at me and see a writer who is obsessed with the relationship between rich and poor and with how the rich somehow or other always manage to betray the poor even when they don't mean to.

I am not unconscious of the persuasive power exerted by these considerations to drag men along in the current but I am not at liberty to travel that road.

I'm interested in current affairs and social policy as a whole but I don't watch politics for sport.

In politics the number of women in the cabinet has fallen and if current poll trends continue and Labour loses a number of marginal seats the number of female MPs is likely to drop significantly.

Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half of the time.

For while the subjects of poetry are few and recurrent the moods of man are infinitely various and unstable. It is the same in all arts.

But I don't think that poetry is a good to use a contemporary word venue for current events.

But I am not political in the current events sense and I have never wanted anyone to read my poetry that way.