Ian on Sunday

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.

The place I have loved the most in my life is the garden my wife has created.

Love of sport is woven into the fabric of my long life.

I have loved Poetry all my long life. It is impossible for me to name an all-time favourite – though Derek Walcott’s   A LETTER FROM BROOKLYN would be a contender.

Not all that long ago, looking into the future, it would have been easy to prophesy  the situation in South Africa: the whites in their apartheid laager fighting on and on a prolonged last-ditch battle against an ANC growing increasingly militant and the whole country disintegrating into blood-soaked ruin.

On March the 8th I attended a Night of Recognition in honour of Reds Perreira at Bourda.

One ordinary morning some years ago I had an unusual experience.

My father was a gentle, calm, and wise man. “He never raised his voice except to give encouragement nor raised his hand except to greet a friend.”

The great unabridged Oxford English Dictionary contains half a million words.

Who can doubt that the West Indian nation in relation to its tiny population and insignificant economic and military weight has been disproportionately blessed by the fruits of our extraordinary range of creative men and women.

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

Some years ago I was invited by the Queens Park Cricket Club in Trinidad to their Annual Dinner and made a speech during which I described what I thought would make any sports Club great.

I once read a long article about two remarkable books: “The Poetical Works of Gerard Manley Hopkins,” published by the Clarendon Press in Oxford, and “The Early Poetic Manuscripts and Note-Books of Gerard Manley Hopkins in Facsimile,” published by Garland in New York.

Karl Popper (1902-94), one of the greatest thinkers of his, or any age, was modest in expressing his philosophical findings.