It’s vital to our understanding of a complex world, and to our intellectual dexterity, to be able to hold two different concepts in our heads at once without assuming that they’re mutually exclusive.
If you’re ever going to throw a book at a wall, it’ll be during the next few pages.
It takes quite a leap of self-importance to decide: “I’m going to put a stop to that!
Do you think Britain is a great country? I do, basically. It’s embarrassing to admit it. And it feels un-British to admit it, except for the fact that it’s embarrassing, which is a very British sensation. Embarrassment is one of our strongest emotions.
The media’s obsession with conflict means that we’re confronted with it so relentlessly that we’ve stopped questioning why it’s there in the first place.
It’s never a good idea for politicians to get involved in comedy.
Clark Kent, aka Superman, is to leave his reporting job in the forthcoming issue of the comic. Initially I assumed he was protesting against all the nasty commenters on the Daily Planet website: the thousands calling him an arsehole without having paid for the paper, or complaining that he only got to save the world because of his posh upbringing on Krypton.
How better to separate actions from any sense of their meaning than with dance? The global success of Gangnam Style has shown the way.
I’m attracted to its inappropriateness. It sticks out, it’s noticeable, which is refreshing in the current era of public discourse, when all prominent figures seem at pains to be blandly appropriate: to show the expected level of respect, rage, shock, support, joy or grief. I like the judge for having taken the trouble to find something odd to say – something interesting and off-message. It’s a rare skill.
I’ve been wasting your time for two paragraphs. I’m still wasting it now. You should stop staring at this page and get out there:.
Life goes much more smoothly when everyone’s saying sorry. It’s the second most important social lubricant and, unlike the first, it doesn’t damage your liver.
If I could express exactly what was most annoying, ungrateful and unreasonable about my own behaviour before the person I’d angered, then the situation would be defused. You can’t have an argument with someone who’s saying exactly what you’re thinking.
Changing lives isn’t a good thing anyway, unless you’re changing them for the better.
There’s pressure to recycle, pay higher taxes, not travel on planes, avoid products manufactured by enslaved children, stop borrowing money we can’t pay back, stop lending money to people who won’t pay it back, and abstain from tuna.
We’re in touch with the zeitgeist, but are too down-to-earth to be impressed. Who doesn’t want to come across like that?
Apostrophes, however, I love with all my heart. I support the correctly used apostrophe with that kind of fierce emotional investment in an irrelevance that most people reserve for football.
Meanwhile, there’s no counterbalancing evidence that correctly applied apostrophes keep comma numbers down, or that the grocer’s ones encourage pesky hyphens.
If we all just settle into small, mutually ignorant online support groups exchanging comforting half-truths, then civilisation is in for a rough ride. No one will know what is really going on, and working out what is really going on has, for most of history, been humankind’s main purpose. Losing that is a high price to pay for being able to order pizza without speaking to anyone.
I know my saying that will annoy some people, but that’s OK because they’re the very people I take most pleasure in annoying. So if you’re thinking about getting annoyed, you might want to consider not giving me the satisfaction and agree with me instead.
Marmite!’ Never has a product more successfully concealed the truth of its mediocrity merely by conceding the fact that some people find it disgusting.