I only met Margaret Thatcher twice. The thing that I thought about meeting her was how extraordinarily intelligent she was. You really had to be on your game otherwise she'd make mincemeat of you.

The West sees Iran as an important force in the gulf.

Masks beneath masks until suddenly the bare bloodless skull.

I grew up reading 'The Jungle Books' and loving them.

It's Kennedy's war, Vietnam. Lyndon Johnson got all the flak, but it's Kennedy's war.

I had a very difficult relationship with my father, which ended up okay, but there were many difficult years.

He had picked up languages the way most sailors pick up diseases; languages were his gonorrhoea, his syphilis, his scurvy, his ague, his plague.