Ian on Sunday

I regret I start with grimness in my Christmas column this year.

Anyone who writes about life must think about death. It is not being morbid to do so.

It happens all the time in small, closely-knit groups – cabinets, party executives, boards of directors, sports associations, church congregations or club committees.

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.

Free trade remains the ideology of the age and protectionism the discarded evil.

I have two indelible pictures in my mind – inscribed there not through seeing the exploits myself but through listening at the time with a fearful pride and thereafter hearing eye-witnesses tell their vivid stories of how it happened.

America’s insatiable appetite for oil is leading to her own ruin and endangering the whole world.

In my home, a step down off the dining room, overlooking the beautiful garden my wife has created, I have my studiolo.

The debate about what constitutes happiness has been going on for thousands of years.

When I worked in the sugar industry I remember once discussing a problem with a young and junior colleague.

The title I gave to my last collection of poems was Between Silence and Silence. 

Death is among the most ordinary of experiences. After all everyone dies.

They have become an inspiring part of Guyana’s poetic heritage.  I found them instantly unforgettable.

As I get older I find I try to capture in memory more fully than ever the passing marvellousness of an ordinary day by writing down what happens in a journal.

Two impulses contend in me – one is to allow chaos to take hold and the other is to keep everything tidy and in good order.

Theodor Fontane is the German writer best known as the author of novels which are considered “the most completely achieved of any writer between Goethe and Thomas Mann.” 

for what else is there but books, books and the sea, verandahs and the pages of the sea to write of the wind and the memory of wind whipped hair in the sun, the colour of fire.

One of the most remarkable men of the 20th century undoubtedly was King Sobhuza the Second, Lion of Swaziland. 

It has been a pleasant diversion to think back over the years and give brief accounts of outstanding people whose paths in life I have crossed, if only peripherally.

In a long life I have read the books and been taught the deeds and studied the scholarship and seen the art of the famous in many great countries of the world.