“I was in my mid-teens when someone gave me a copy of 'Pears Encyclopaedia of Myth and Legends' as a birthday present. It sat on my shelves for many months before I looked at it. When I did, I couldn't stop reading it.”

“I was in my mid-teens when someone gave me a copy of 'Pears Encyclopaedia of Myth and Legends' as a birthday present. It sat on my shelves for many months before I looked at it. When I did, I couldn't stop reading it.”

“The weakness in traditional Scottish nationalism lay in its own inability to grasp that identity could not be the only factor in the march to independence.”

“Those who really value Ukrainian sovereignty should opt for real independence and a positive neutrality: neither a plaything of the West nor Moscow.”

“Independence is the only way Scotland can realise its full political and cultural potential in the 21st century.”

“In the Seventies, we still had dreams and hopes of Utopia, but by the end of the decade, the world had shifted to the right.”

“The heathen could only be eliminated as a force if their culture was completely erased.”

“This is the permanent tension that lies at the heart of a capitalist democracy and is exacerbated in times of crisis. In order to ensure the survival of the richest, it is democracy that has to be heavily regulated rather than capitalism.”

“Monotonous talk of the end of American hegemony, the universal cliché of the period, is mostly a way of avoiding mounting a serious opposition to it.”

“That natural disasters are required to provide Americans with a glimpse of reality in their own country is an indication of the deep rot infecting the official political culture.”

“Proximity to power has an unsurprising ability to mutate a politician's spinal cord into bright yellow jelly.”