Ian on Sunday

Life at 80 is as full of adventure and interest as it ever was but the adventures and interests are now mostly sedentary.

Last week Colin Campbell, an old Etonian and quintessentially English, died at his home in Blackhorse Lane, South Mimms, in Hertfordshire at the age of 86.

In teaching me about life when I was a boy my father always took pains to impress upon me the value of time – more precious than the rarest metal and not something hoardable.

I do not get the impression that governance in the world is good or that it is getting better.

Sport is an inexhaustible source of good conversation and friendly disputation.

A J Seymour is Guyana’s greatest man of letters. Martin Carter is the nation’s most renowned  poet; Edgar Mittelholzer, Wilson Harris and Roy Heath are our outstanding novelists; and Denis Williams combined in one man a Renaissance range of talents as artist, novelist and anthropologist.

One way or the other, if any nation is to do well, beneath and beyond the rhetoric and the fruitless slogans, the real work has to be done by ordinary people who do not indulge in the rhetoric and who do not shout the slogans.

Secretly, like an earthquake underground hardly noticed, a revolution is going on which will eventually change completely the way the world is organized.

When I was young I sometimes used to sit in the evening with an old aunt while she told her rosary beads.

“Records are there to be broken,” Sobers observed when asked how he felt when Lara eclipsed his world record Test score of 365.

There is an exact relationship between how language is used and how power is exercised.

What an astonishing thing a book is. It’s a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles.

The diaries of William Gladstone, one of the greatest British prime ministers, are astonishing.

I love poetry. It is the quiet passion of my life.

In any given situation we assume that people, including ourselves, will act sensibly.

Arriving at the age of 80, so suddenly after being born, I recognize very clearly that I am slowing to a jog if not quite yet a hobble.

As golden afternoon transmutes into silver evening and then into velvet darkness fretted by stars I sit to read and think and dream.

Samuel Johnson, that great man of letters and heavyweight of good sense in eighteenth century England, commonly said the people whom we should most beware in the world are those who constantly insist on finding fault, those whose clouds are never lit by silver linings, those who everlastingly “refuse to be pleased.”

Sveinsson Knut, Canute the Great, King of England from 1016, King of Denmark from 1018 and King of Norway from 1030 until he died in 1035, was perhaps the most successful and effective of the early rulers of England.

The younger generation never experienced, and older people tend to forget, how very limited and how very stifled the media was in the last period of President Burnham’s rule.