Ten Downing Street is a house, not an office. That is its most important characteristic.

There is no consensus even today on the merits of Napoleon - and certainly no agreement on the rights and wrongs of the origins of the First World War.

Men like Hitler and Stalin and their immediate lieutenants cannot plead in defence of their actions that these were justified by the accepted values of that time.

Prison is an expensive way of making bad people worse.

We, Britain and Germany, can neither of us be happy about our handling of the Iraq war.

Margaret Thatcher, growing up in a bombed and battered Britain, derived a distrust which has grown with the years not just of Germany but of all continental Europe.

It is normal for politicians in all countries to profess themselves the pupils of history, anxious to draw the right lessons from her teaching.

History provides no precise guidelines.

But Germany will always suffer, I fear, from the intensely dramatic character of the crimes of the Third Reich.

We should be wary of politicians who profess to follow history while only noticing those signposts of history that point in the direction which they themselves already favour.

We must admit that history is enjoyable to a large extent because it enables us to pass judgment on the past.

It was a well-known fact that keeping track of time was not Parry Pretty's forte...If time were Parry's pet, it would have died tied to a tree somewhere out back long ago.

I need you like the day needs the night" -Quinn O'Shea

My thoughts ran a wool-gathering.

It is better to anticipate than to react.

Suffice it to say Cherie Snodgrass and I were good friends a long, long time ago. After Mr Snodgrass confronted my wife, the friendship ended and my marriage remained intact.

Capitalism, perhaps at its most remorseless, is a physical manifestation of psychopathy.

I grew up in Birmingham, where they made useful things and made them well.

I didn't know," I start truthfully, "that it was the hard way when I started on it.

I didn't know who Meredith Monk was, and I knew about Laurie Anderson but I didn't know her music that well.

Every time you wink the stars move.