I get letters every year from women who think Valentine's Day is an empty exercise, but are ironically pretty exercised when their boyfriends neglect or forget it.

Ironically, for a few million people in the Far East, I did become an English teacher through my music.

The sad part about our past is that religions, ironically enough, are responsible for creating the most destructive idea that has ever been visited upon the human race: the idea that there is such a thing as 'better.'

Ironically, women who acquire power are more likely to be criticized for it than are the men who have always had it.

Ironically, parenting is a shame and judgment minefield precisely because most of us are wading through uncertainty and self-doubt when it comes to raising our children.

What we need in medical schools is not to teach empathy, as much as to preserve it - the process of learning huge volumes of information about disease, of learning a specialized language, can ironically make one lose sight of the patient one came to serve; empathy can be replaced by cynicism.

Ironically, the pursuit of happiness can lead us into the eternal trap of chasing unhappiness.

So whom does God wrong in commanding the destruction of the Canaanites? Not the Canaanite adults, for they were corrupt and deserving of judgment. Not the children, for they inherit eternal life. So who is wronged? Ironically, I think the most difficult part of this whole debate is the apparent wrong done to the Israeli soldiers themselves. Can you imagine what it would be like to have to break into some house and kill a terrified woman and her children? The brutalising effect on these Israeli soldiers is disturbing.

In the pragmatist, streetwise climate of advanced postmodern capitalism, with its scepticism of big pictures and grand narratives, its hard-nosed disenchantment with the metaphysical, 'life' is one among a whole series of discredited totalities. We are invited to think small rather than big ? ironically, at just the point when some of those out to destroy Western civilization are doing exactly the opposite. In the conflict between Western capitalism and radical Islam, a paucity of belief squares up to an excess of it. The West finds itself faced with a full-blooded metaphysical onslaught at just the historical point that it has, so to speak, philosophically disarmed. As far as belief goes, postmodernism prefers to travel light: it has beliefs, to be sure, but it does not have faith.

"The sense of tragedy - according to Aristotle - comes, ironically enough, not from the protagonist's weak points but from his good qualities. Do you know what I'm getting at? People are drawn deeper into tragedy not by their defects but by their virtues.

Ironically for a few million people in the Far East I did become an English teacher through my music.

The sad part about our past is that religions ironically enough are responsible for creating the most destructive idea that has ever been visited upon the human race: the idea that there is such a thing as 'better.'

Ironically women who acquire power are more likely to be criticized for it than are the men who have always had it.

Since those who believe they need a hero/celebrity outnumber the actual heroes/celebrities people feel safe and comfortably justified in numbers committing egregious crimes in the name of the greater social ego. Ironically diminishing their own true hero-celebrity nature in the process.

Ironically Latin American countries in their instability give writers and intellectuals the hope that they are needed.