OUTSIDE of the Mafia, the family is the most effective repository of secrets, most of them bad.

Some people are managers almost from birth, some followers. Which is not to assume either subservience or inferiority on the part of the followers. Many people, over the last couple of decades, got shoved into leadership roles because companies developed an ‘up or out’ theory.

WHEN the Green Party asked me to serve as a discount X Factor judge at its party conference this weekend, I didn’t know whether to be flattered or insulted.

THE current bitching about the outrageous salary levels enjoyed by top bankers is an aspect of equity theory, the idea proposed in the mid-1960s by psychologist J Stacy Adams.

No, I don’t know the names of the Brass Neck 10. I do have a list, of course. Everybody does. How many are on your list? Mine has 13 people on it. One way or the other, I’m tearing it up.

FOR some mothers-to-be, it happens in the morning.

ON THIS page, last week, Ivan Yates briefly and facetiously included my name in a list of women to be considered as nominees for the presidency before deciding — as he would — that to put a third woman in Áras an Uachtaráin would be excessive and it was time the job reverted to the male side of the population.

FRENZIED brainwashed loyalists ready to die for their Emperor, they were manic in their patriotic determination to destroy American shipping.

THE cynicism with which the Pope’s venture onto YouTube was greeted is ill-informed.

NOBODY’S sure just how many people are going to form the crush in the Mall and line the streets of Washington for tomorrow’s inauguration.