Dunsinane

MalcolmLook at you.Dull.Every time I try to become excited by the prospect of ruling this country the truth comes sidling in to put out whatever flames of passion my patriotic sentiments might have managed to kindle and my heart feels cold again. You're all thieves. Thieves and the sons of thieves. Mothered by whores. I don't mean anything insulting by saying this – unless the truth is insulting.It's a country of your making. I've just come back to it.If you make me king I promise you one thing only – total honesty. In that spirit I offer you the following. I will govern entirely in the interests of me. In so far as I give consideration to you it will be to calibrate exactly how much I can take from you before you decide to attempt violence against me. I will periodically and arbitrarily commit acts of violence against some or other of you – in order that I can maintain a more general order in the country. I will not dispose my mind to the improvement of the country or to the conditions of its ordinary people. I will not improve trade. I will maintain an army only in order to submit you to my will. As far as foreign powers are concerned I will submit to any humiliation in order to keep the friendship of England.There are some positives.81I like dancing.So I imagine I will hold big dances.I like music and singing so when I visit you in your several castles you can look forward to having a good time for many days in a row.And, most important of all, you need not waste even a minute of your long cold nights wondering about whether you are in or out of my favour. You are out of my favour. Now and always.

ancient lights

TomThank you very much … Thank you … Hey, who says the British are tight-assed? Am I allowed to say that on TV? Excuse me? … My pleasure, totally, it's great to be here, Michael. I love England. I did a couple of years here as a student and I totally fell in love with just about everything. That whole experience has kind of resonated down my life, you know? I always knew I'd come back, it was just a matter of when … I mean, like, to stay a long while … maybe take a house … Excuse me? … I'm over to see some old college friends actually … we were like the three musketeers, shared a house for two years, me and two women, knew each other inside out. Still do. It's good to get together occasionally … I remember this thing from like twenty years back for some reason, I've never forgotten it. I was walking along a river bank in England this time, on a beautiful breezy summer's day, and there was an old house right there on the towpath, with chestnut trees and honeysuckle, and roses falling over the gate, and on the side of the house, high up, near the roof, was a wooden sign that said 'Ancient Lights'. And it struck me like a poem, like an echo of something long gone, kind of pagan and all tied in with this old, old river and this tumbling greenery, and it's just, I guess, kind of stayed with me, it's kind of reverberated inside of me all these years, you … Excuse236me? Sorry, sorry, I just got in from LA, so I'm a little tired, a little slow on the uptake. Have you tried melatonin? Some kind of mineral or vitamin or maybe it's an herb. I don't think it's chemical. Something to do with your pineal gland. It kind of takes the edge off jet lag. I'm double-dosing. Maybe I should triple-dose. There's some other thing where you shine a light at the back of your knee, d'you know if that works? But right, yeah, the weather … well … it's pretty scary after California, but I kind of like it. Real snow. I haven't seen snow for, like, ten years. I mean, I can't believe it. Real fucking snow … Well, what can I say?Big sky … it did pretty good business in the States, so we're hoping, you know … Right, I play Joe Washington, he's a paraplegic forensic guy whose marriage is in a mess and he's drinking too much and there are some really weird killings going on and you know he gets to thinking … I don't know, basically I play a cripple in an Armani suit who gets to have sex with a lot of women.

gates of gold

ConradNo. I have forgotten everything about what went before me. I am now forgetting everything that will come after me. I was once asked, 'What have you achieved in the theatre?' I replied, 'Nothing.' 'And what will you leave after you?' 'Well, the same, nothing.' The young man I gave those answers to, he was very angry with me, for he was planning to devote his life to this profession and he believed I was trying to destroy him. I wasn't. I was saving him. Or maybe I was seeing what he wanted, and he didn't like what I saw. For this was his beginning, his continuing, his end. He would, like myself, like yourself, turn into nothing, be not remembered and yet he would work with all his heart to prevent such forgetfulness. I believe in work. I am a hard-working man. That is how I have led my life, but where was it leading me? Nowhere? Perhaps. But that is immaterial. I work with all my strength to achieve – nothing. To leave nothing. That is what I have done and will never deny it. In that I am a man of a certain generation, a hard-liner – Stalin, you call me. But perhaps I belong to an earlier generation. I may be, like yourself, a follower of the Venerable Bede. Now there was a monk among monks. They were violent men. When the Vikings attacked, these holy men, chanting their aves to the goddess they loved, drew from the60sleeves of their habits grenades, shotguns, knives and rifles. They blasted the bastards to kingdom come. Or so I believed, growing up as a boy, near Jarrow in the north of England.

polar bears

JesusThis is heaven, John. There is no other place. This72is not some poorly organised waiting room for a brighter, warmer, kinder world. This is all you will ever know. You can accept it or you can reject it. Which strikes me pretty much as a no-brainer. But that's just my opinion.Stage four is butylic fermentation. That's twenty days or so. Body goes flat. Dries out. Maggots can't feed any more. So you're left with beetles and anything else which muscular jaws that can chew at the tough bits. You get a different bad smell now. Butylic acid. Same smell you get in Parmesan and vomit. You'll see hide beetles, carcass beetles, cheese flies.Finally you go into the dry decay phase. Bones, hair, skin. No significant moisture. All the potential nutrition's been used up. At which point mummification starts. Which can carry on for … well, how long is a piece of string?Pause.This is heaven. The hurt and the rot and the cruelty and the madness. People stick hearts on Valentine's cards and get married in white dresses and give each other flowers. They think love is everything going right. That's not love. That's self-indulgence. That's good luck. Love is when you walk into the burning building. Love is when the person who means most to you in the whole world is breathing through a mask and pissing in a bag. Love is when they no longer know your name.Pause.I've got to go. Things to do. People to see. You look after yourself, OK?

wild east

FrankIt was a tiny flat with one room and while we were drinking their mother was sleeping in a bed in the corner of the same room.This was a tiny town on the edge of nothing much and these guys said there was nothing to do there except drink and buy pirate CDs. And we listened to Lou Reed and we drank and after a while I said I had to go and they said go where and I said I just have to go because I had18started to think who are these guys, and a while back one of them had taken out a knife to cut up a piece of bread. So I left and I was standing in the middle of this place and it was summer, so it wasn't cold but it was dark, and I thought I would go and walk in the forest to clear my head and then I would go to the station and wait for a train. I walked to the edge of this forest and I sat and watched the sun come up, the most enormous sun, and then I felt I would just take a look in the forest. And then you know what happened next? One bit of forest looks exactly like another and, Jesus, I started to realise those guys in the flat had had my interests at heart when they tried to stop me because, well, no one knew I was in the forest and it probably covered a thousand miles and I was lost in it and after eight hours I began to cry and I thought I am never going to get out of here alive. I thought how stupid I was And how I would miss people and how thirsty I was. Then I must have fallen asleep because I woke up and it was much colder and darker and one of my eyes must have been bitten 'cos I couldn't open it, and I became convinced I was going to die for real, and then I thought I better make the most of my last hours so I sucked some dew off some leaves and I just lay looking up at the trees and I realised that at least I was dying in the most beautiful place on the earth. Because this forest was, well, very beautiful and this time as the sun came up I could hear birds. And then I realised that I was being a prick and I had to make an effort so I dragged myself up and I chose a direction. I just made a choice and I walked and walked and two hours later I was at the train station.

the power of yes

LovelockI'm a lawyer. A lawyer has to do a lot of things he doesn't approve of. The members were after the windfall, that's what they wanted – a few thousand pounds. And yet the absurd thing is, most of them got that windfall in the form of shares, which they didn'teven bother to cash, so that when the resulting bank went bust, they lost everything.Once Bradford and Bingley became a bank, I remember taking an immediate dislike to a new non-exec who said, 'I want one thing from this company.' He said, 'What I want is regular, incremental growth.' In other words, he was saying, 'This company must grow every year.'Now we all know that nothing in the world shows regular incremental growth. You know that. I know that. But in the stock market they rip out the profit and bugger the future. The majority of investment isn't handled by individual investors – who can be bothered to look in the paper every day to see how their shares are doing? No, it's handled by fund managers, who are driven by quarterly figures. Every quarter, they have to prove they're doing better than other fund managers or else the client will take their money away. So fund managers are looking at businesses and demanding more and more money out of them.I mean, there came a moment when you could smell the corruption. This was madness. If you said to a taxi driver, how would you like it to be a condition of driving your taxi that each year you pick up more fares than the year before, he would tell you you were off your head. And yet the people who engineered this madness – people who lent 125 per cent of the value of a house – refuse to admit they did anything wrong.If I tell you the HBOS accounts run for 200 pages… and 28 of these pages are about corporate governance – oh yes, the remuneration committee has sat, the correct number of women have been appointed, the appropriate checks and balances are in place. It's all box-ticking. It's like a ship which you're being told is in apple-pie order, the decks are cleaned, the metal is burnished, the only thing nobody mentions, it's being driven at full speed towards an iceberg.