There are two things you never turn down: sex and appearing on television.

When Ronald Reagan's career in show business came to an end, he was hired to impersonate, first, a California governor and then an American president who would reduce taxes for his employers, the Southern and Western New Rich, much of whose money came from the defence industries. There is nothing unusual about this arrangement. All recent presidents have had their price-tags.

Universities are filled with poets and novelists conducting demure and careful lives in imitation of Eliot and Forster and those others who (through what seems to be have been discretion) made it.

Apparently, 'conspiracy stuff' is now shorthand for unspeakable truth.

The world came so close to self-destruction during my lifetime. I was serving in the American Army, in the Pacific, at the time they bombed Hiroshima and then Nagasaki, and I felt there something like a foretaste of the end of the world.

History is idle gossip about a happening whose truth is lost the instant it has taken place.

The New York Times is the worst in that hardly anybody can write English over there. Most of it reads like slight translations from the German.