We don't have to worry about which of these great shows is 'better', whatever that means. Cable TV is where contemporary writers get to stretch their wings, and these shows are like Victorian novels in their leisurely, enormous reach. The longeurs and distracted wanderings that some see as flaws in The Sopranos are part of the pleasure of this generous narrative flow.

Clive James's fine essay on the Sopranos (collected in "The Meaning of Recognition") traces its TV origins to "I, Claudius" -- not for nothing is Tony's mother named Livia. Tony's pathetic gang of deluded savages quote "The Godfather" at each other and perform as if in a great tragic opera, but mumbling their lines and falling over the props, while the truly tragic characters in "The Wire" are most of them wonderfully eloquent, and unfold themselves in almost poetic speech, even during one crime scene scene, where the only dialogue is 'Fuck!'

I gave "The Wire" my greatest personal accolade when, after watching the first two series from bittorrent, I went out and bought them.

I have read only Shikasta, at the recommendation of a friend -- whose tastes have often let me down, come to think of it. I found it remarkably pedestrian and dull, ill-written and ill-constructed, and the ideas driving it little more than a kind of jury-rigged Platonic astrology. Joan Didion has a good piece on her somewhere (somewhere in these piles of books...) and talks about how she seems to shout at you things you already know. Didion, more generous than I am, kept reading though. I guess I shall now have to try again. Nobel winners are always great writers, don't you know...

"no one should quiz him about his religious beliefs or vote against him because of his church".

So we can quiz him about his financial history, his views on the family, his police record, hobbies, reading preferences, pets -- anything, but religion, for some reason, is out of bounds. Once again religion is presented as something that needs special deference, fenced off from criticism and judgement. And yet believers would have us think that a man's religion speaks most intimately to who he is, to his ethics, his understanding of the world.

Now there are no atheist candidates, so for millions of citizens voting according to religious preference is already barred, but just as I might hesitate to vote for a Baal worshipper practising baby sacrifice, I might justifiably hesitate over a subscriber to a religion which is not only an egregiously, transparently barmy scam made to measure for the weak-minded, but also has a dark, very recent history of racism and sexual exploitation.

How can this not be relevant? And surely Romney's own rhetoric (that creepy 'required') makes it more so.

This is just babble. It might have helped if Salon had used an interviewer who actually understood Darwin (evolution is not random), or who was prepared to ask difficult questions, such as: given that there are fundamental mysteries in nature (something scientists cannot deny, since it would leave them nothing to do) how do you get from what is a perfect vacuum in our knowledge to 'knowledge' of a highly specific god, one whose thoughts theologians even claim to know? Or: how do you reconcile the impoverished myths of an ignorant desert tribe with a universe some 13 billion years old? (What was god doing all that time? Why does the Bible treat this world as if it were the centre of the universe?) If the Bible should not be taken literally, how do believers decide which parts are optional and which obligatory?

There is nothing at all to connect the transcendent mystery of creation with, say, an invisible lunatic who arranged to have his own son tortured to death so that he could give up his plan to burn us all in hell. Under what authority does Haught claim to know that a camera could not have recorded the resurrection? There can be none: he is just making it up. It is no wonder atheists are getting angry, when apologists for religion can invent arguments at random and expect to be taken seriously, even chastising atheists for being ignorant of their inventions.

And they accuse atheists of being closed-minded. Well, I am not tormented by thoughts that Wotan, for example, might be real, I've never felt I ought to sacrifice a child to Baal, and I'm quite certain Haught and Huckabee are not keeping an open mind on these questions either.

I don't find anything hopeful in the idea of a personal god: I find the idea utterly horrifying. The meaning of my life comes from how I live it and from the - real - world around me; it does not have to be borrowed from god at infinite interest.