"It’s distressing to view the news and see another burnt out car or one crushed to half size, a dark cover placed over its windows. Yet thinking over my own life and looking through family history it is clear that, for us so far, the horse has been more lethal than the car. Though born and brought up in an inner suburb of Sydney even I have had two close brushes with death by horse. "

"As we’ve seen, Russian scientists in the mid-19th century were becoming intensely engrossed in the study of cerebra, especially those of high achievers. Unsurprisingly, many a patriotic luminary gladly obliged with posthumous fodder for the nation’s great research machine. If nothing else, I guess, it was gratifying to be asked.

Typical was the case of novelist Ivan Turgenev, who was only too delighted to leave his body for research. For their part, neuro-anatomists couldn’t wait to get their hands inside his skull."

"Forget Eysenck. Forget Myers-Briggs. Forget Cattell. Forget Thurstone. Forget the Minnesota Multiphasic. Look, when push comes to shove, there’s really only one personality question that counts: “Are you a hoarder?”"

Ronald Reagan once said, “You can tell a lot about a fellow’s character by his way of eating jellybeans.” Well, I’m here to inform you that you can tell even more about a fellow’s character once you know if he’s a hoarder or not.