Ambrose Bierce

Divorce: a resumption of diplomatic relations and rectification of boundaries.

Prejudice - a vagrant opinion without visible means of support.

Lawsuit: A machine which you go into as a pig and come out of as a sausage.

Although I write to entertain, and try to keep my work free of didacticism, I do have a rather passionate belief in our need to be connected to - and to learn from - history.

Recently, I was in Bernalda, my dad's ancestral home town in Italy. He has just refurbished a palazzo and turned it into a hotel, so we had my sister's wedding there. It was beautiful.

We can safely abandon the doctrine of the eighties, namely that the rich were not working because they had too little money, the poor because they had much.