In all my life I have treated the press with marked contempt and remarkable success.

Considering the company I keep in this place, that is hardly surprising.

One thing about bureaucrats is that they never swallow their young. Leave them alone and you'll find them increasing every year.

Thinking ahead, what really happens to us will depend on how many people we have who are of the great and sober and dynamic middle-class - the strivers, the planners, the ambitious ones.

"I pay my taxes," says somebody, as if that were an act of virtue instead of one of compulsion.

What Great Britain calls the Far East is to us the near north.

The kind of people I myself represent in parliament; salary earners, shopkeepers, skilled artisans, professional men and women, farmers and so on, these are, in a political and economic sense, the middle class. They are for the most part unorganised and unselfconscious.