If you can't get a job as a pianist in a brothel, you become a royal reporter.

We're taking part in a divine comedy and we should realise that the play is always a comedy, in that we're all ultimately ridiculous.

It's miraculous how much easier the computer has made my sort of work.

I've always found women more loyal, more disciplined, less neurotic, more hardworking. I just think they're perfect colleagues. Whereas, God knows, I've dealt with plenty of neurotic men.

I'm a wet liberal really, and always have been. But I'm sort of an aggressive wet liberal.

As George Orwell wisely observed a generation later, the only way swiftly to end a war is to lose it.

A Tory government with a decent mandate seems the only hope of tackling the fiscal catastrophe responsibly.