I could be spending time looking through a telescope or into a microscope and finding out the most extraordinary, wonderful things, but people say faith can move mountains. Faith in what, by the way? You haven't said.

Millions of people die every day. Everyone's got to go sometime.

At Oxford one was positively encouraged to take wine during tutorials. The tongue must be untied.

It's no fun to appreciate to the full the truth of the materialist proposition that I don't have a body, I am a body.

I learned that to be amusing was not to be frivolous and that language - always the language - was the magic key as much to prose as to poetry.

I was brought up in a very naval, military, and conservative background. My father and his friends had very typical opinions of the British middle class - lower-middle class actually - after the war. My father broke into the middle class by joining the navy. I was the first member of my family ever to go to private school or even to university. So, the armed forces had been upward mobility for him.

A faction willing to take the risks of making war on the ossified status quo in the Middle East can be described as many things, but not as conservative.