Ian on Sunday

The insights of others continually add to our understanding of what is going on and how the world works. 

My heart has grown heavy and heavier yet in recent times, as I have contemplated what seems to be the gradual fading of the dream of West Indian unity.

When I was asked by Cricinfo to join the panel choosing an all-time West Indies Cricket XI my first inclination was to decline.

The work of the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa (1888-1953) is hardly known to English-speaking peoples.

In a vibrant democracy elections should be a cause for celebration, an ever welcome occasion regularly marking the successful outcome of what in any country’s history has always been a long struggle to overcome authoritarian, and often brutal, rule.

When I was young I showed an aptitude for games. After a lot of hard practice I played tennis best, but I was also for my age a fair centre-half in football, I was a good swimmer, I could hold my own among the athletes especially in middle-distance running, and I played reasonably good games of table tennis and badminton.

It is frustrating, not to say humiliating, to think how much one is missing by not knowing any language except one’s own.

What relationship between human beings is the most complex, deep, intense? 

Do you find, as I do, that as time passes you accommodate a vast sludge of useless information which remains stored in the brain for no purpose whatsoever?

A third of a New Year has passed away. This seems astonishing to me.

I am writing this column after reading about what has happened to Tony Judt.

Having long passed the Biblical span of three score years and ten, I realize clearly that this overtime gifted by the Gods must be very carefully husbanded.

It seems but a month or two ago that I was observing, with no great excitement to be sure, my last birthday.

A friend asked me how important a part poetry plays in my life.

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

Headlines which constantly remind us of lethal crime heighten the sense of life’s fragility in all of us.

There are good signs that the cause of literature in the state is being championed more vigorously.

Again this year the Link Show was a huge popular success.

God is by no means infallible. She seems to have made pretty obvious errors in some of her attempts at creation.

Recently, a long-time friend, Dr Riyad Insanally, reminded me of how heart-beatingly exciting the prospect of great cricket matches and the matches themselves used to be.