She is a reflection of comfortable middle-class values that do not take seriously the continuing unemployment. What I particularly regret is that she does not take seriously the intellectual decline. Having given up the Empire and the mass production of industrial goods, Britain's future lay in its scientific and artistic pre-eminence. Mrs Thatcher will be long remembered for the damage she has done.

Politics is the art of choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable.

There is an insistent tendency among serious social scientists to think of any institution which features rhymed and singing commercials, intense and lachrymose voices urging highly improbable enjoyment, caricatures of the human esophagus in normal and impaired operation, and which hints implausibly at opportunities for antiseptic seduction as inherently trivial. This is a great mistake. The industrial system is profoundly dependent on commercial television and could not exist in its present form without it.

There are two kinds of forecasters: those who don’t know, and those who don’t know they don’t know.

No hungry man who is also sober can be persuaded to use his last dollar for anything but food.

Banking may well be a career from which no man really recovers.

It is almost as important to know what is not serious as to know what is.