My mum is incredibly leftwing, and my dad was quite rightwing - no surprise they didn't stay together - and so I had two very conflicting political opinions as a child, neither of which I was interested in taking any notice of, being a sort of little...
We've come a long way from having one land line that was forbidden to be answered during dinner. We had no answering machine, just a dad who barked, 'Who calls during dinner? If it's important, they'll call back.' He was right.
When I was really young, Dad wasn't that well known. I don't remember when I realised he was a writer, but I do remember him leaving his full-time job at the Central Electrical Generating Board to concentrate on books.
My dad's cooking was magic in the kitchen. But eventually over the years, his personality changed and his ability to remember recipes failed. He became paranoid and thought people were stealing from him, when often he was just misplacing things.
Those inevitable dreams where you can't get your column in, you know, and at first they were the Xerox telecopy, and then they were the fax machine, and then they were, you know, email. The anxiety remains the same, but the technology has changed.
Being asked to play one of the butlers is like being picked to play for England. All you have to do is think of the great butlers from the past - Terry-Thomas in 'How To Murder Your Wife,' John Gielgud in 'Arthur' and Denholm Elliott in 'Trading Plac...
I have great fun with the Togs - Terry's Old Geezers and Gals. They're a group that formed around me over the years of my radio shows. They are loyal to me and I'm loyal to them, so I've been to their conventions - Leicester University gives us their...
If I categorized home runs that I've seen, without a doubt the monumental one is Henry's... but I've seen a lot of classic, great home runs. Gibson's was probably the most theatrical home run I've ever seen.
As anyone who has read 'Sports Illustrated's Steve Rushin knows, it's quite possible to write an unreadable column without being a TV pundit. But if you want to be a consistently good columnist, you can't be on television.
The government of Sudan, employing a back channel direct from its president to the Central Intelligence Agency, offered in the early spring of 1996 to arrest Osama bin Laden and place him in Saudi custody, according to officials and former officials ...
When the women's movement started in the 1960s, there was a vision of a future where women didn't wear makeup or worry about how their hair looked, and everybody wore sensible, comfortable clothes. It ran into an absolute brick wall.
I think there can be a positive sort of futurism even in a presentist society. But I think it's a kind of futurism that envisions augmenting human ability and intellect rather than creating some artificial machine intelligence that displaces us.
Committed partisans are generally the most knowledgeable voters, independents the least. And the more political knowledge people have, the more apt they are to discuss politics with people who agree with, and reinforce, them.
Psychopaths know the technical difference between right and wrong - which is one of the reasons their insanity pleas in criminal cases so rarely succeed; they just fail to act on that knowledge.
'Orientalism' has successfully built my critical awareness to question and see the big picture of knowledge, perspective or idea from a Western point of view and always see things from different perspective.
Public schools helped create the idea of America and inculcate Americans with a few rudiments of knowledge. To judge by that very American item, the Internet, a few rudiments is all anyone cares to have.
We give you the facts. I told you information is power - knowledge is power. We can't be in an ideological battle to redeem the soul of this country if we don't have the facts.
It may interest you to know that my breakup with Terry and this mystery did not happen concurrently in real life. That is a writer's device, which places Gabriel under even greater pressure when the mystery begins to reveal itself.
The situation around Terri Schiavo was a deeply held conflict over what to do if someone isn't going to return to consciousness or competence. Who will decide? Even there, where we had settled legal rules, we still had disagreement. We're torn about ...
Parallels between classical and pop are not new. The whole San Francisco movement of John Cage and Terry Riley went hand in glove with what the Velvet Underground were doing.
It occurred to me in my junior year of high school. I got my first letter from a big college. I still have that letter to this day - a letter from Indiana.
