Ian McDonald

Our lives of such infinite value come and go in a whirl of busyness. 

We cannot afford to cramp or antagonise or even bore our intellectuals and our artists, our wits and our craftsmen, our dreamers and our thinking men and women.

The poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins – glancing and incandescent – is some of the most extraordinary to be found in English.

To put it mildly, West Indies Cricket – especially Test Cricket – has fallen on parlous times.

I tell the story of Tony Judt. Tony Judt was a writer on recent world history whom I greatly admired. 

I have always loved sport. All my boyhood and youth I delighted in games.

“You gave me gifts, God-Enchanter.   I give you thanks for good and ill.

History often saddles people with reputations that are undeserved. Take Florence Nightingale.

Life at 90 is full of interest but the interests are now mostly sedentary.

Intermittently through the years, and especially during memorable times up the immense and soul-redeeming Essequibo, I liked to read Shelley – as we all should do from time to time since he is pre-eminently the poet of hope.

How is a great poem created? It is a mystery. It is like asking for an explanation of a square cut by Gary Sobers or a cover drive by Rohan Kanhai.

Everywhere in the world the ordinary man in the street has been brainwashed into supposing that the only thing that matters is economic success.

I once received a letter from a fifth-form student in England.

The importance of using clear, accurate language in explaining the problems that face a nation like Guyana cannot be too strongly emphasized.

A Lost Girl Speaks Do not consider that I lived in vain consider I lived a while in wonder and will now forever live for you.

I will sort out and clear up and put in immaculate order my disgracefully disordered study/storeroom downstairs where there are dusty stacks and boxes of files, papers, diaries, correspondence and books which could one day be of interest to my descendants and even perhaps some value to scholars if I can ever get around to preserving them properly.

It seems not a day, and certainly not a week, passes without our stomachs being turned by appalling news of women cruelly abused, beaten and, often enough, murdered in headline – hot, red blood.

Every moment in our lives is embedded in the extraordinary architecture of our minds.

Most jobs are done because they have to be done – to earn a living, support a family, get on in the world, secure the future.

At 90 I am in overtime and a penalty shoot-out looms which I know I cannot win.