quotes of the week

The people who are trying to turn Tony [Blair] into a macho man are making a wrong judgement and they endanger our victory ... I had a talk [last night] with the nice Tony Blair. I really like that one. I think that is the real one.

Clare Short MP to 'New Statesman'

Because the track is owned by Railtrack, the trains by someone else, and the driver employed by someone else, it is so much more difficult to conduct an inquiry. Everyone wants to protect their own interests.

Peter Rayner, former BR manager, after last Thursday's train crash outside Watford

Who is to say that we are not all Martians, that Mars was where life first started?

Professor Richard Zasre, who designed the spectrometers and electron microscopes which made it possible to detect bacteria fossils on a 3.5 billion-year-old meteorite from Mars

It is a beautiful game. I wish I had learned about it 30 years ago.

Joe McGinniss, American author, who has returned a $1m advance for a book about the OJ Simpson trial in order to focus on writing about his new passion, soccer