Silence is regarded as a sort of sin now, and it has to be filled with a lot of gossip and soundbites.

Diplomacy is unfashionable in the world of knee-jerk reaction and the dogmatic sound bite on television.

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

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

We should be wary of politicians who profess to follow history while only noticing those signposts of history that point in the direction which they themselves already favour.

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.

War on Iraq runs the risk of turning the Middle East into an inexhaustible recruiting ground for anti- western terrorism.