Long periods of recession, which tend to be self-perpetuating, are usually ended by war, or by preparations for it.

In the long term, it is desirable that the human race, faced with the prospect of extinction on Earth, should prepare an escape route for itself to another inhabitable planet.

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

For me this is the vital litmus test: no intellectual society can flourish where a Jew feels even slightly uneasy.

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.

Marxism, Freudianism, global warming. These are proof - of which history offers so many examples - that people can be suckers on a grand scale. To their fanatical followers they are a substitute for religion. Global warming, in particular, is a creed, a faith, a dogma that has little to do with science.

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.