If I see a door ajar, I push on it to see how far it will open, and if it opens wide I go through it.

The most evil person I ever met was a toss-up between Pablo Picasso and the publisher-crook Robert Maxwell.

Hell is being trapped in a night-club with the'beautiful people'and forced to live in a'luxury penthouse flat'.

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.

In 1924 Mao took a Chinese friend, newly arrived from Europe, to see the notorious sign in the Shanghai park, 'Chinese and Dogs Not Allowed'.

I very much wanted to be editor of the 'New Statesman!' But I never wanted to be prime minister, except maybe as a little boy.

It takes less than a decade for today's luxury to become a universal necessity.