The most socially subversive institution of our time is the one-parent family.

The writer learns to write, in the last resort, only by writing. He must get words onto paper even if he is dissatisfied with them. A young writer must cross many psychological barriers to acquire confidence in his capacity to produce good work-especially his first full-length book-and he cannot do this by staring at a piece of blank paper, searching for the perfect sentence.

The Second World War took place not so much because no one won the First, but because the Versailles Treaty did not acknowledge this truth.

A Stalin functionary admitted, Innocent people were arrested: naturally - otherwise no one would be frightened. If people were arrested only for specific misdemeanours, all the others would feel safe and so become ripe for treason.

In the last generation, with public Christianity in headlong retreat, we have caught our first, distant view of a de-Christianized world , and it is not encouraging.

It is one of the many ironies of this period that, at a time when the intelligentsia were excoriating Mellon for tax-evasion, and contrasting the smooth-running Soviet planned economy with the breakdown in America, he was secretly exploiting the frantic necessities of the Soviet leaders to form the basis of one of America's most splendid public collections

As a child I found railroad stations exciting, mysterious, and even beautiful, as indeed they often were.