Schadenfreude Is So Nutritious.

Death, The Real Simile For Disease - For When We Are Ill, Do We Not Always Feel Like We Are Dying, Even If It's Only A Little? - Remains, Despite Our Secularism, The Most Metaphoricised Phenomenon Of All.

Vaughn's Vision Is Older, Wiser And Harder Than Ritchie's.

If The Government Announced That It Was Going To Allocate A Vast Tranche Of Education Funding Purely To The Pupils At The Best Public Schools, There Would Be A National Outcry - And Yet This Is Precisely What The Olympics Represents In Terms Of Sports Funding.

A Short Story Is A Shard, A Sliver, A Vignette. It's A Biopsy On The Human Condition But It Doesn't Have This Capacity To Think Autonomously For Itself.

What Fiction Offers Us Is An Intimacy Shorn Of The Messy Contingencies Of Human Existence - Gender, Race, Class Or Age. Those Moments Of Transcendence When We Exclaim "you Know Exactly What I Mean!" Depend For Much Of Their Force On The Anonymous Character Of The Intimacy Between Writer And Reader.