The behaviour of President Bush on 11 September certainly gives rise to not unnatural suspicions.

There is something about a bureaucrat that does not like a poem.

When anyone says to me, 'Can you keep a secret?' I say, 'Why should I, if you can't?'

Our only political party has two right wings, one called Republican, the other Democratic. But Henry Adams figured all that out back in the 1890s. "We have a single system," he wrote, and "in that system the only question is the price at which the proletariat is to be bought and sold, the bread and circuses."

France is a nation devoted to the false hypothesis on which it then builds marvelously logical structures.

Do nothing that is not natural - and ritual is natural - and all will be for the best.

Our rulers for more than half a century have made sure that we are never to be told the truth about anything that our government has done to other people, not to mention our own.