Karls Diary

Extract from Karl's Diary from The World of Karl Pilkington by Karl Pilkington.

Published by Harper Collins in 2006.

When Karl Pilkington's perfectly spherical head first reared up on the Ricky Gervais Show podcasts, you'd have been forgiven for assuming that he was merely the daft mate from the pub who'd been brought along to make up the numbers. As it turned out, Pilkington became the main reason for tuning in each week, effortlessly outpacing Gervais and Stephen Merchant when it came to tickling the funnybone of the nation. A true idiot savant, Pilkington possessed a brain so strangely wired that no opinion was too bird brained for him to adopt as gospel truth. A typical observation would be, "If you saw an old fella eating a Twix, you would think, 'That's a bit weird, innit?'" On the strength of such inspired nonsense, he gathered a huge cult following. Gervais went so far as to describe him as the funniest man in Britain.

Selected by Alan Williams

One No, Many Yeses

Excerpt from One No, Many Yeses: A Journey to the Heart of the Global Resistance Movement by Paul Kingsnorth.
Published by Simon and Schuster in 2003

It could turn out to be the biggest political movement of the twenty-first century: a global coalition of millions, united in resisting an out-of-control global economy, and already building alternatives to it. It emerged in Mexico in 1994, when the Zapatista rebels rose up in defiance of the North American Free Trade Agreement. The West first noticed it in Seattle in 1999, when the World Trade Organisation was stopped in its tracks by 50,000 protesters. Since then, it has flowered all over the world, every month of every year. The 'anti-capitalist' street protests we see in the media are only the tip of its iceberg. It aims to shake the foundations of the global economy, and change the course of history. But what exactly is it? Who is involved, what do they want, and how do they aim to get it? To find out, Paul Kingsnorth travelled across four continents to visit some of the epicentres of the movement. In the process, he was tear-gassed on the streets of Genoa, painted anti-WTO puppets in Johannesburg, met a tribal guerrilla with supernatural powers, took a hot bath in Arizona with a pie-throwing anarchist and infiltrated the world's biggest gold mine in New Guinea. Along the way, he found a new political movement and a new political idea. Not socialism, not capitalism, not any 'ism' at all, it is united in what it opposes, and deliberately diverse in what it wants instead -- a politics of 'one no, many yeses'. This movement may yet change the world.

Selected by Mike Pinnington