Power brings a man many luxuries, but a clean pair of hands is seldom among them.

Cicero most reminds me of Harold Wilson. Both men knew how to keep the show on the road.

Does a name stick because it suits a man or does the man, unconsciously, evolve into his name?

The true currency of life is time, not money, and we've all got a limited stock of that.

What a heap of ash most political careers amount to, when one really stops to consider them!

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 book unwritten is a delightful universe of infinite possibilities. Set down one word, however, and it immediately becomes earthbound. Set down one sentence and it’s halfway to being just like every other bloody book that’s ever been written.