It is eerie being all but alone in Westminster Abbey. Without the tourists, there are only the dead, many of them kings and queens. They speak powerfully and put my thoughts into vivid perspective.

IQ in general has improved since tests first began. Psychologists think that this is because modern life becomes ever more complicated.

The really clever people now want to be lawyers or journalists.

Everyone writes in Tolstoy's shadow, whether one feels oneself to be Tolstoyan or not.

My belief has come about in large measure because of the lives and examples of people I have known - not the famous, not saints, but friends and relations who have lived, and faced death, in the light of the Resurrection story, or in the quiet acceptance that they have a future after they die.

I am shy to admit that I have followed the advice given all those years ago by a wise archbishop to a bewildered young man: that moments of unbelief 'don't matter,' that if you return to a practice of the faith, faith will return.

I had lost faith in biography.