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The upper-middle-class members of the Beggar's Benison club in Scot­land, founded in 1732, apparently thought nothing of arranging meetings where they could drink, sing and fondle naked women. Such evenings were brought to a fitting climax, as it were, when they would commu­nally ejaculate into a ceremonial pewter platter.

Americans need to vote to kick the state out of the bedroom, or the boardroom, but not both.

Medically, it was possible to make a woman speak, but there was no medical way of making one silent.

As someone who has studied Mandarin for years, I can tell you that the most difficult aspect of any language to master is neither tone, grammar, nor spelling, but rather how to use it to commu­nicate with a woman.

A golden wedding is a terrible time for a marital crisis.

The happy life seems to be lived in accordance with goodness, and such a life implies seriousness and doesn't consist in amus­ing oneself.

The judges decided that a child who has been brutalised becomes freer to make sexual choices. So a child prostitute is somehow no longer a child.

People inherit mitochondria only from their mothers, which is why only the female line of descent can be tracked using them.

Being liked is not the same as doing shit.

Being gay-friendly can attract gay customers, too. Witeck-Combs Communications, a consultancy, estimates that gay Americans spend $835 billion a year. But But homosexuality is still illegal in 76 countries — including such vibrant business hubs as Dubai and Singapore — and is punishable by death in Saudi Arabia, Iran and parts of Nigeria. 29 US states still allow discrimination on the basis of sexual preference.

"As part of their daily lives, children across Europe and the world con­tinue to be spanked, slapped, hit, smacked, shaken, kicked, pinched, punched, caned, flogged, belted, beaten and battered in the name of dis­cipline, mainly by adults whom they depend on."

Ali Hili, head of a group called Iraqi LGBT, (Lesbian, Gay, Bi­sexual and Transgender) says that since the 2003 invasion more than 700 people have been killed because of their sex­uality. Lesbians in Muslim countries tend to have an easier time: in Iran they are sentenced to death only on the fourth conviction.

Why, though, allow yourself to be ambushed if you are a female? Why mate with a second-class beau who cannot be bothered to bring you the fishy equivalent of roses and diamonds? No matter how hard males compete, they will always be outwitted by the wiliest, most subversive competitors of all: females.

With their talk of placing stability and growth above individual rights, Communist officials sometimes make human rights sound like air conditioning, or colour television: a luxury you can afford once you acquire a certain level of wealth.

Women can be required to lift their veils "if necessary" — would that be before or after a veiled suicide-bomber detonates her (or his) device?

It is particularly striking in a Stockholm playground filled with Somali toddlers, squeaking as they queue for sledge-rides.

When most people talk about "broken Britain" they mean whether some­one stands for a pregnant woman on a train or fears being stabbed for asking kids to throw their litter in a bin.

In 1849 George Bancroft, an American historian and diplomat, said that for a man to have two countries was as intolerable as for him to have two wives.

It is thought that about 10m Asian women sell sex to 75m men, who in turn have a further 50m regular partners.

Sharing a womb is not an ideal start to life.

To Mr Santorum the Supreme Court's ruling in 2003 that anti-sodomy laws were unconstitutional was a bad mistake: this was a slippery slope that would establish a right to bigamy, polygamy, incest, adultery — "an­ything".

When Iranians say "Death to America" they sometimes mean

"Please America, show me more love".

"Pre-salt oil is like a pretty woman on a dance floor full of men," Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, Brazil's president, put it bluntly. "Everybody wants a go."

Relatives, friends, children and dogs are du, everyone else is Sie.

"Bin Laden", he said, "is the illegitimate child of Ronald Reagan and Mar­garet Thatcher".

To Edward Weston Charis Wilson was a landscape — in the re­peated curve of her thigh and calf he saw shapes like sea shells, with the luminescence and faint muscular rays of the great chambered nautilus. Her torso, outlined in light, was like the trunk of a cypress tree just entering the soil. Her skin, every fol­licle and flaw in focus in the ground glass of his lens, had the same sun- and sea-wind weathering, but fainter, of the stones of the Californian desert, and her hips had the convolutions of the naked mountains.

Any Mohawk who marries a non-native must leave. "Everyone knows the law: if you marry out, you stay out".

Mr Ahmadinejad compared Hillary Clinton, the American secre­tary of state, who has asked Syria to distance itself from Iran, to "the daughter-in-law's mother", in the Iranian family a symbol of easily ignored powerlessness.