I had lost faith in biography.

I'm like Jane Austen - I work on the corner of the dining table.

One symptom of his (Hitler) being strangely at variance with reality, or the nature of things,was his gift for wearing inappropriate of ludicrous clothing...When he was supposed to be starting a militaristic revolution he was wearing evening dress and an ill-fitting black tailcoat...and his army medals.

Since Einstein developed his theory of relativity, and Rutherford and Bohr revolutionised physics, our picture of the world has radically changed.

I think I became a Catholic to annoy my father.

I was once naïve enough to ask the late Duke of Devonshire why he liked the town of Eastbourne. He replied with a self-deprecating shrug that one of the things he liked was that he owned it.

It is hard to think of anything which more tragically and clearly exemplifies the phenomenon of good political intentions achieving the precise opposite of their aim.