I think about death sometimes. Analytically, of course.

Truly good manners are invisible: they ease the way for others, without drawing attention to themselves. It is no accident that the word “punctilious” (“attentive to formality or etiquette”) comes from the same original root...

To those who care about punctuation, a sentence such as “Thank God its Friday” (without the apostrophe) rouses feelings not only of despair but of violence. The confusion of the possessive “its” (no apostrophe) with...

Jessie had never heard you could inherit madness. She thought madness was something that just happened to people in Shakespeare when the wind got up.

When you by nature subscribe to the view that everyone except yourself is a berk or a wanker, it is hard to bond with anybody in any rational common cause.

We have a language that is full of ambiguities; we have a way of expressing ourselves that is often complex and elusive, poetic and modulated; all our thoughts can be rendered with absolute clarity if...

…intelligence nowadays is all about application: it is the ability ‘to take in a complex system and learn its rules on the fly’. For young people, this ability is second nature. Any fool knows that,...

Everyday, you get home from the shops with a bag of cat food and bin-liners and realise that, yet again, you failed to have cosmetic surgery, book a cheap weekend in Paris, change your name...

No valentines from the cats again.

Many aspects of our screen-bound lives are bad for our social skills simply because we get accustomed to controlling the information that comes in, managing our relationships electronically, deleting stuff that doesn’t interest us. We...

We read privately, mentally listening to the author’s voice and translating the writer’s thoughts. The book remains static and fixed; the reader journeys through it.

…when a phone call competes for attention with a real-world conversation, it wins. Everyone knows the distinctive high-and-dry feeling of being abandoned for a phone call, and of having to compensate – with quite elaborate...

All the important roles shortly boiled down to one: remember your with other people; show some consideration.