It's impossible, I think, however much I'd become disillusioned politically or evolve into a post-political person, I don't think I'd ever change my view that socialism is the best political moment humans have ever come up with.

I think I write in a fairly self-confident manner.

Margaret Thatcher has shown that there is power and dignity to be won by defying the status quo and the majority rather than by adapting to them. If the British left, which she froze into immobility like Medusa, could bring itself to learn from this, then we might not have to look upon her like again.

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.

Those of us who are most genuinely repelled by war and violence are also those who are most likely to decide that some things, after all, are worth fighting for.

Allow a friend to believe in a bogus prospectus or a false promise and you cease, after a short while, to be a friend at all.

I'd always somehow felt slightly as if I'd been born in the wrong country.