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Is there any such thing, on a forum of this type, as a personal message that is solicited, or are the vast majority of PMs, by their very nature, unsolicited? Are the majority of PMs, therefore, spam?

There are so many, for very much the kind of reasons that CDA mentioned – imagine seeing Shakespeare or Beethoven – but it would probably come down to either the 1870s or the late 1920s in Berlin, for Bismarck in the first instance (an absolutely fascinating and brilliant figure) and for the...

I've got the Folio Society edition of this on my shelf awaiting reading. I'd been wanting a book on Elizabeth I for some time and bought this because I discovered, after a little research, that JE Neale seems to have been a proper historian who was particularly renowned for his work on...

I disagree, Jaybe. It's not a pointless question as long as people who believe in gods attempt to rule the lives of those who believe in different gods or none at all. It's not a pointless question as long as people murder doctors because their god doesn't like what those doctors do, or fly...

Don't forget SFG75 – because I know that you know from a discussion elsewhere – that I've been there, done that and got the t-shirt. For the sake of this debate, since we now seemed to be lapsing into: 'oh you're an atheist so you don't know what faith feels like', I'll repeat my own story...

Roadside Picnic by Boris Strugatsky and Arkady Strugatsky The Strugatsky brother's sci-fi novel is a classic of the genre that expands far beyond it, and is a veritable millefeuille of themes and ideas. At it's most basic level, Roadside Picnic tells the story of Red, a 'stalker' who...

Personally, I don't care if people want to believe in Zeus, Odin, unicorns, the Flying Spaghetti Monster or fairies at the bottom of the garden. And of course, belief in any of these requires no proof (which is a darned good thing really, since none of them exist). What many people do get...

Perhaps you'd do better listening to actors and not film stars. ;)

With respect – it isn't that there is not "enough" evidence that any god exists. There is no evidence that any god exists. And since you cannot prove the non-existence of something, it is up to believers to prove that their god exists, if they want to (which would destroy faith, but there you...

It's simple. There is no evidence whatsoever for any form of god, as described by any of the world's religions. If something 'bigger' does exist, it extremely unlikely to be anything even remotely akin to the gods that have been worshipped by humans and the gods that continue to be worshipped...

Nothing to Be Frightened Of by Julian Barnes You can't accuse novelist Julian Barnes of picking an easy subject to write about in his new non-fiction outing. But after apparently spending the majority of his life with an acute awareness of his own mortality, Barnes has decided to confront...

And you shouldn't be celebrating it today anyway, since it's not allowed (for Catholics anyway) to celebrate saints' days in Holy Week.

When are you looking at visiting and how long would you be staying? Do you like cities or countryside? What sort of transport – if any – will you have?

When visiting someone's home for the first time, I always clock whether they've got books visible (and music and DVDs). It's probably less a question of what books they've got and more – initially at least – that they've got books. I've visited some houses that look as thought the rooms should...

Not specifically, no. I would quote you directly if I were. :) Good points. I also remembered Shirley Valentine – book and film.

A little clarification: the link is not to a list of "the best fiction of the 20th century", but to "The Best English-Language Fiction of the Twentieth Century". And unless Aquablue is suggesting that there's not one good piece of fiction that's been written in any language other than English...

So, women having affairs is new and people writing and reading about it are deserving of a "low opinion"? Nobody's read Flaubert's Madame Bovary or any Zola, I take it?

Why not? Why does enlightenment preclude anything that is relevant to an individual? If one has, for instance, lived a sexually repressed life, then sexual liberation can be the enlightenment – or can lead to the enlightenment – that one might need or be searching for.

Just occurred to me to mention this here. For UK readers, today and for the next six days, the Guardian is producing a series of booklets about a batch of great 20th century poets, with brief introductions to their work by the likes of Jeanette Winterson and John Banville, and, of course...

It's simplistic beyond belief if anyone thinks that educating the sexes separately will change performance by females in 'male' academic subjects (which is what the research quoted – and subsequent work – was about). The issue is self-image, and performance by females in traditional 'male'...