Courage does not mean not fearing or not grieving. It does mean recognizing and resisting terror management right away, from the moment of the attack, precisely when it seems most difficult to do so.

When a terrorist attack comes, you will not necessarily know who did it. What you can know is that certain kinds of leaders will use that to suspend your rights.

It is aspiring tyrants who say that 'civil liberties end when an attack on our safety begins.' Conversely, leaders who wish to preserve the rule of law find other ways to speak about real terrorist threats, and certainly do not invent them or deliberately make them worse.

Brittle masculinity, in the right setting, becomes political atrocity. Strength brings problems; weakness brings others, but weakness posing as strength is the most dangerous of all.

And some of what we're doing in Government even now, some of the welfare reform programs that are helping lone mothers come into work are based on things that were very new under the Labour Government in the eighties.

When you're a crime reporter, you see the nub of what life's about, and you don't have much patience for the falsity of politics.

What modern humans need help with is escaping from the despair of politics, commerce and media, escaping from the drabness and oppressiveness of worldly values and seeing through suburban mentality and normal community standards so that they can find some much-needed relief for their wilting souls.

Politics is not about winning for the sake of winning.