Ian McDonald

So much begins with parents. Their daily, persevering, unending love and interest and example teach lessons which reach deep into us; we are nurtured and our minds and souls are formed into shapes and disciplines that last all our lives.

A child who develops a love of reading wins a prize that will last and last until the end of life.

Isaiah Berlin was in my view the most distinguished political philosopher and historian of ideas of the 20th century.

I do not think the new, young, intelligent and opened-minded Minister of Education will mind me delivering little, well-meant lectures to her from time to time.

Some of the most vivid poems in the world are written on a huge rock in a remote forest in Sri Lanka.

Politics being a very serious thing, especially in the aftermath of a hard-fought election, I thought I might see what the Oxford Dictionary of Humorous Quotations (obtained at Austin’s excellent bookstore which every thinking citizen should visit at least once a week) has to say about this important subject.

I hope the young, intelligent and energetic Minister who has been put in charge of education in the country takes a fresh look at what needs to be done.

In a recent conversation with Godfrey, amidst the multitude of evocations that continually cascaded out of his extraordinary memory, he told me about bird-whistling competitions and donkey-cart racing in Guyana long ago, and described to me the hundred and one manifestations of that condition of bewitched infatuation in a man or a woman called typee.

I wish I could convey, in particular to young people, whose mental appetites seem whetted so easily these days by the transient and the trashy – I wish I could communicate the quiet depths, the delights, the leaping excitements of great poetry.

I’ve had the good fortune lately to do one of the things I enjoy the most – browse in good bookstores and buy a stock of books to read and add to my library.

The perception seems to be that sugar is dead in most Caricom countries and dying in the rest.

I regret I start with grimness in my Christmas column this year.

Anyone who writes about life must think about death. It is not being morbid to do so.

It happens all the time in small, closely-knit groups – cabinets, party executives, boards of directors, sports associations, church congregations or club committees.

We should beware the over-mighty State. A State that gathers all powers to itself drains initiative away from where it does most good – at the local level, at the level of the small group, the family, the individual.

Free trade remains the ideology of the age and protectionism the discarded evil.

I have two indelible pictures in my mind – inscribed there not through seeing the exploits myself but through listening at the time with a fearful pride and thereafter hearing eye-witnesses tell their vivid stories of how it happened.

America’s insatiable appetite for oil is leading to her own ruin and endangering the whole world.

In my home, a step down off the dining room, overlooking the beautiful garden my wife has created, I have my studiolo.

The debate about what constitutes happiness has been going on for thousands of years.