So the news that divorced fathers are to be denied a legal right to a relationship with their children, in the long overdue review of family law published this week, fills me with horror and despair.

He gets into the habit of thinking so passionately at night that he begins to be persecuted by insomnia.

The De Bernières were very military. I broke the military tradition but I was terribly proud of my father being a soldier.

Symmetry is for God, not for us.

When you have children it completely shifts your focus; they become the most passionate love of your life...

Beauty is precious, you see, and the more beautiful something is, the more precious it is; and the more precious it is the more it hurts us that it will fade away; and the more we are hurt by beauty, the more we love the world.

How strange that the world should change because of words, and words change because of the world