The British have always coped without becoming a dictatorship.

The British have always coped without becoming a dictatorship.

In the 66 years that I have been alive, there has not been one hour, of one day, of one month, of one year, when there has not been a threat aimed at us.

It is cold at six-forty in the morning on a March day in Paris, and seems even colder when a man is about to be executed by firing squad.

The stubbornness of a weak man should never be underestimated. The weak tend to be very stubborn when they've decided on something.

He was one of the masters of the thriller and he really was one of the great signposts, because he took the spy thriller out of the gentility of the drawing room and into the back streets of Istanbul and where it all really happened, ... The Day of the Jackal.

As ever with modern Britain, we are let down by a vast, over-manned, over-funded, hidebound, obstructive, box-ticking and incompetent bureaucracy.