At the end of the nineteenth century, a fanatical craze for physical fitness swept through Britain. Millions of men and women took up gymnastics, body building, and other physical exercises. Such a thing had never happened before, and it was given a name - Physical Culture.

There is no doubt that online shopping has fed the craze for speed, because when you can't touch the fabric or try on the outfit, the only emotion you experience is the excitement of the purchase and the thrill of beating everyone else to it.

Merit pay has failed repeatedly, and it's no surprise. When you base teacher pay on standardized test scores, you won't improve education; you just promote the high-stakes testing craze that's led parents, students and educators to shout 'Enough!' all across the country.

When, however, one reads of a witch being ducked, of a woman possessed by devils, of a wise woman selling herbs, or even of a very remarkable man who had a mother, then I think we are on the track of a lost novelist, a suppressed poet, of some mute and inglorious Jane Austen, some Emily Bronte who dashed her brains out on the moor or mopped and mowed about the highways crazed with the torture that her gift had put her to. Indeed, I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.

At times it's as if the Silicon Valley inmates are running the VC asylum. But what might seem like unicorn-crazed chaos from the outside looking in is actually carefully structured.

Regarding the fitness craze: America has lost its soul; now it's trying to save its body.

It's a funny thing - when I'm crazed with work spending time with my children relaxes me. Yet at the end of a long weekend with them the very thing I need to relax is a little work and time away from them!

My niece was very much caught up in the vampire craze for young adults and she thought having a vampire boyfriend would be a cool thing. What do you do on a first date? The more I thought about it the more fun I had imagining what you'd serve a vampire for dinner.

It is my personality alone that has brought back the waltz and made it a global craze.