It is normal for politicians in all countries to profess themselves the pupils of history, anxious to draw the right lessons from her teaching.

There are thus great swathes of the past where understanding is more important and reputable than judgement, because the principal actors performed in line with the ideas and values of that time, not of ours.

If Margaret Thatcher had been Prime Minister at the time, there would have been no Treaty of Maastricht.

Ten Downing Street is a house, not an office. That is its most important characteristic.

But Germany will always suffer, I fear, from the intensely dramatic character of the crimes of the Third Reich.

History provides no precise guidelines.

Margaret Thatcher, growing up in a bombed and battered Britain, derived a distrust which has grown with the years not just of Germany but of all continental Europe.