To say she was my girlfriend was absurd: no one the wrong side of thirty has a girlfriend… I suppose I ought to have realize it’s ominous that forty thousand years of human language had failed to produce a word for our relationship.

A police state is a country run by criminals

People perish. Books are immortal.

I think it's very, very hard not to go slightly crazy if you're in the top in politics, especially if you're there for a long time.

I write as well as I can. I'm a journalist at heart, so it's the story that matters.

My greatest regret as a writer is that I've never been able to include as many jokes as I'd like.

Egyptologists, skilled in piecing together the papyri of lost civilisations, suddenly discovered that the same talent could be applied to working out the pattern of German radio traffic.