Ian on Sunday

Put poetry on the buses I favour the reintroduction of public transportation.

Will any record ever go unbroken? It seems impossible that Michael Phelps’s record of winning fourteen Olympic gold medals, with more to come in London in 2012 when he will only be 27, will ever be broken.

In an article reviewing Kasia Boddy’s book Boxing: A Cultural History the American writer Joyce Carol Oates quotes from that dark, unsettling philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche: “Every talent must unfold itself in fighting.”

An Olympic memory I am the ultimate sports junkie. If games were abolished by some satanic world dictator I would be almost as lost as if he banned all books.