In Tbilisi in 1990, I recall watching zealous Georgians smash statues of Lenin and Stalin. A few days earlier, though, in Moscow I had been invited to address the Red Army, as one of the first Brits to benefit from Glasnost. The subject they chose: The Cuban Missile Crisis.
People can be a bit flagrant when they're having an affair. Most of the time, there's an element of it where they want to be discovered because they're in crisis. They need the boil to be burst, in some way, for a resolution.
If your life just falls apart early on, you can put it together again. It's the people who are always on the brink of crisis who don't hit bottom who are in trouble.
Simply put, drilling in ANWR would be expensive, environmentally devastating, and would do very little to fix our energy crisis or to bring down the price of oil and gasoline.
Every single day, I get letters - very moving, overwhelming letters - testifying how much my books have meant to people in times of crisis in their lives, when they were very ill, say. If I ever doubted that writing could play an important part in people's lives, I don't doubt that now.
Then came the hostage crisis during which Carter did nothing to rattle the ayatollahs who hung tough until Ronald Reagan was inaugurated, when they suddenly backed down.
Debt, we've learned, is the match that lights the fire of every crisis. Every crisis has its own set of villains - pick your favorite: bankers, regulators, central bankers, politicians, overzealous consumers, credit rating agencies - but all require one similar ingredient to create a true crisis: too much leverage.
Our response has been, 'Well, let's then make an effort to get the Israelis and the Palestinians to sit around the table.' That hasn't happened. So we only have ourselves to blame for this crisis.
At this time - we're in a dramatic crisis - euro bonds are precisely the wrong answer. They lead us into a debt union, not a stability union. Each country has to take its own steps to reduce its debt.
This world crisis came about without women having anything to do with it. If the women of the world had not been excluded from world affairs, things today might have been different.
The science linking the increased frequency and severity of extreme weather to the climate crisis has matured tremendously in the last couple of years.
The stuff that's going on is just so over-the-top, with the banking crisis and destroying the Gulf of Mexico, and the outrage hasn't quite caught up with the people yet. But when it does, I think you're going to see really virulent anti-authoritarian kind of comedy coming out.
