Rex Murphy quotes:

Everything written, if it has anything in it, will offend someone, and if the mere taking of offence was to amount to a licence to kill the offender, well the world would be sadly underpopulated of novelists, columnists, bloggers, and the writers of editorials.

Not every article in every magazine or newspaper is meant to be a valentine card addressed to every reader's self-esteem.

Shania Twain ... has done more for country and western than heartbreak and whiskey combined.

Stay away from philosophy, kids: it will ruin your mind.

Hollywood is a narcotic, not a stimulant. It wants to sell you something. Literature wants to tell you something.

The Prime Minister, a specialist in calling in the locksmith after the horses had fled - the whole herd in fact - and the barn in ruins, ended the week with a great raft of ethics proposals for cabinet, leadership candidates, backbenchers and lobbyists. I think it is more than fair to ask: Why wait for the middle of his third term to institute what the public would have welcomed at the beginning of his first?