Like most dictators, Col Gaddafi detests the metropolis. His vision of Libya is a kind of Bedouin romantic medievalism, suspicious of universities, theatres, galleries and cafes, and so monitors the cities' inhabitants with paranoid suspicion.

I admire Turgenev, Camus, Proust and Shakespeare, but I've also learnt a lot about writing from composers and artists.

My family settled in Cairo in 1980. I was nine. I missed Libya terribly, but I also took to Cairo. I perfected the accent. People assumed I was Egyptian.

Nothing makes you feel more stupid than learning a new language. You lose your confidence. You want to disappear. Not be noticed. Say as little as possible.

Grenfell, the building set on fire with the help of its own face, is a scene of a complex injustice: one that is moral, economic, political, and aesthetic. Not only was the cladding unsafe, it was ugly; not only was it ugly, it was untrue both to the architecture of the building it covered and untrue to its responsibility to human safety.

When I was 12 years old, living in Cairo, my parents enrolled me in the American school. Most of the Americans there appeared oddly stifled, determined to remain, if not physically then sentimentally, back in the United States.

In the end, madness is worse than injustice, and justice far sweeter than freedom.

Dreams have consequences.

Ivan Turgenev's novella 'First Love' is one of the most perfect things ever written.

Turgenev's achievement lies in how he succeeded, in spite of himself, his country, and his time, in exempting his work from public duty. This has given it that unnameable quality that makes every sentence true, every silence trustworthy.

Language is not just a code; you are writing into its history, into its tides.

Gaddafi's ability to have survived so long rests on his convenient position in not being committed to a single ideology and his use of violence in such a theatrical way.

All great art allows us this: a glimpse across the limits of our self.

Like all novelists, I'm interested in the filters between reality and the imagination.

Marriage civilizes males by making them responsible for their children and by imposing on boys the need to develop the bourgeois habits of self-discipline and work that make them attractive mates.

The inevitable campaign for 'gender balance' in Silicon Valley will also be indifferent to the fact that females are fast surpassing males in other sectors of the U.S. economy.

Obamacare's terrifyingly cumbersome, competition-hostile apparatus for controlling medical costs is one of its most obvious flaws.

Federal transfers are not even a zero-sum proposition; they are a negative-sum proposition, leaking value at every step of the way, thanks to the costs of collecting federal tax dollars, then trickling them back out to the states' own costly bureaucracies via federal paper-pushers who write and oversee grant programs.

If Republicans want to change their stance on immigration, they should do so on the merits, not out of a belief that only immigration policy stands between them and a Republican Hispanic majority.

Hispanics' welfare consumption - and their affinity for the Democratic message - will decline over time as they climb the economic ladder.

Hispanics' support for the Democratic economic agenda, both in California and nationally, stems in part from their receipt of government assistance.

Moreover, Hispanics' sympathy for big government represents a cultural predilection as well as an economic one.

Biological fathers are of slight importance to the raising of children, after all, and the larger the welfare state, the more employment for crucial members of the Democratic base.

If, by deferring or maybe even skipping college entirely, students were foregoing their one hope for immersion in Western civilization, there would indeed be grounds for regret.