Don’t lose yourself- you’re the one thing that can’t be found on a map.

Language is a thing of beauty, but our language is warping and dying, and turning into something so horrible that we can’t even speak it out loud anymore.

The results confirm the view that the euro zone export/investment-led recovery is graduating to a more self-sustainable level, supporting expectations of rising interest rates in 2006.

Regular maps have few surprises: their contour lines reveal where the Andes are, and are reasonably clear. More precious, though, are the unpublished maps we make ourselves, of our city, our place, our daily world, our life; those maps of our private world we use every day; here I was happy, in that place I left my coat behind after a party, that is where I met my love; I cried there once, I was heartsore; but felt better round the corner once I saw the hills of Fife across the Forth, things of that sort, our personal memories, that make the private tapestry of our lives.

A map such as that one is worth many hundreds, and as luck will have it, thousands of dollars. But more than this, it is a remembrance of that time before our planet was so small. When this map was made, I thought, you could live without knowing where you were not living.

Mental maps. Maps with edges. And for Auden, for so many of us, it's the edges of the maps that fascinate...