When I was growing up on our 53-acre dairy farm, we were obsessed with food; it was the center of our lives. We planted it, grew it, harvested it, peeled it, cooked it, served it, consumed it - endlessly, day after day, season after season.

I suppose the desire to go to town helped make me ambitious, and the allure of the worlds that came in over the radio also helped. But the rewards of growing up on a farm were far greater in many ways than life in town.

Rock and roll is about desire, about wanting something better. I think my characters all want something better. My understanding of the rock and roll dream is that a kid in an isolated place or a small town or an underprivileged world could transcend it somehow.

Some people will stay at home and be content there. Others are born to run. It's that conflict that fascinates me.

As one of the participants in the Aqaba summit, I can testify that Israel fully expected the Palestinian Authority's newly reorganized and trained security agencies to take harsh action against the rejectionists who sought to wreck the peace process.

The question is, what are we to do in order to consolidate peace on a universal and durable foundation, and what are the essential elements of such a peace?

No prime minister in Britain will ever be able to go to war without the endorsement of a majority of the House of Commons.

In college I studied '60s and '70s radicalism, student activism, forms of political violence, groups like the Weathermen, the Black Panthers, the Symbionese Liberation Army, the New Left.