Ian on Sunday

The Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge is one of the most famous science buildings in the world.

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

At eighty-two years of age one must expect to factor attendance at funerals into one’s monthly (weekly?)

Running anything – whether it is a national government, vast state industry, world-circling multi-national, small family business, or private club – involves making choices.

When I was a young and bursting with energy and exuberant life-force I was eager to travel far and wide, more than ready to range around the world discovering new places and meeting people of every kind, outlook and temper.

Not long ago, in one of his endlessly interesting and instructive ‘So It Go’ columns, Dave Martins lamented the lack of recognition given to our heroes and heroines.

It makes no sense trying to measure the joy which our grandchildren Jacob and Zoey give to my wife and I.

Christmas is about the unique drama of a miraculous birth intended to save all mankind.

I regret I write with grimness in this festive season. Perhaps it is good to remember that for countless millions in the world this is, as T S Eliot reminded us in the greatest poem ever written about the birth of Christ, “Just the worst time of the year.”

Nothing can compare with the beauty and warmth of life at home.

A great part of Brazil has been in the grip of one of the worst droughts in its history: reservoirs running dry, water strictly rationed, particularly in Sao Paulo.

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.

For God’s sake, what is going on? Remember: A young Pakistani girl is shot in the head for trying to educate herself and others like her.

Reading is a good friend, whether the wind blows good or ill.

The list is long in Guyana of problems needing solution and the list isn’t shortening.

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?

Many companies in Japan have a special room for their employees which is called, in free translation from the Japanese, a “letting off steam and bile” room.

I have been thinking of my father. Since he died in 1995 at the age of 89 I have not written very much about him.

I have been looking at a great deal of cricket lately from across the world: Test cricket ‒ the Ashes, India versus Sri Lanka ‒ and ODIs and Twenty/20 cricket from all over.

Even in the worst of times – and who can doubt that the daily, brutal, unstoppable exploits of uncaught criminals have made this time one of widening and deepening fear and frustration – reading comes to the rescue by revealing other worlds of experience where cruelty and mindlessness and man’s inhumanity to man do not continually have the upper hand.