Don't talk to me about what's happened since [Nelson] Mandela! His successor was absolutely hopeless - "no such thing as AIDS" - and this present President... It's a tragedy, you know, what's happened there post-Mandela, because he was an iconic figure.

Bill Heseltine had been at university with me, at the University of Western Australia. I knew him well.

[ Rajiv Gandhi] was such an infinitely more attractive leader than his mother.

It had things that it could do and which I thought were worthwhile: one would be South Africa, of course. And, as I said, I assumed a leadership role within the Commonwealth on that.

I find a fence a very uncomfortable place to squat my bottom.

She [ Elizabeth II] is, you know, "Do-what-you're-told, Lady". But in the Commonwealth, she is much more than just a figurehead.

In sum, the truth is that we luxuriate in the comfortable assertion that women enjoy equality. We have salved our consciences by eliminating the more obvious discriminations like unequal rates of pay for work of equal value. But, in fact, we have not eliminated the inheritance of the millennia that women are lesser beings, an inheritance which still manifests itself in a whole range of prejudice and other forms of discrimination.