When James Frey's 'A Million Little Pieces' turned out to be largely bunk, critics everywhere secretly rejoiced. They knew it, they said.

The Festival of Books is indeed a well-oiled machine, one which leaves most of the other literary festivals in America, including vaunted Brooklyn's, in the dust.

Perhaps crisis forces commonality of purpose on one another.

I feel opera is an expression of artistic excellence. To do it is expensive, as there's a requirement for an orchestra, good voices, excellent sets, and the fact that productions generally have only short runs. But I believe it's something we ought to achieve as a nation.

Wagner had a terrific understanding of politics. In 1829, he was a Marxist revolutionary who wanted to bring down the establishment. He hated religion and churches, which he said enslaved people. But he later developed different views that put art at the centre of the life of the state.

I have never served on a jury because MPs were exempted - or banned, I think.

When you are being interviewed by Jeremy Paxman, you are the prisoner in the dock: assumed guilty unless proved innocent, under intense pressure, on the defensive. There are very few people who can look relaxed in that position.

My grandfather was a great advocate of Scottish art at a time when Scottish artists struggled to be taken seriously. They were not highly regarded, but he fought for them, befriended them, and championed them.

My father was possessed of an extraordinary romantic idealism, an unwavering belief in certain principles. He was always talking about the past. Always. Of course, it has a powerful effect on me.

I was brought up in a house where I was so aware of a life that had been broken by politics and conflict.

I have that normal male thing of valuing myself according to the job I do.

To be in the media is to be in the wings. Being in politics is being on the stage.

People don't understand it, but the most intense occasions in the House of Commons were the ones I enjoyed most. When events could go either way and you could find yourself out of a job by the end of the day, those were the times when you were most on a high.

I don't know why, but I think the eating of food is hugely enhanced when you do it on a train. Even a simple steak and chips, when the world is rushing past outside, can take you to heaven.

'Bradshaw's' is a lovely device for the time-travelling television presenter. I just hope that people buying it aren't doing so with the intention of plotting a tour of 21st-century Europe. They'll find quite a lot has changed since 1913.

They say travel enables you to encounter your opposite. If this is true, I think I may have met mine in a shepherd's hut in Transylvania.

For 'Portillo's Hidden History of Britain,' I arranged to meet men and women who were witnesses to history - ordinary people who were caught up in extraordinary events.

From Brighton to Bradford, from Suffolk to Somerset, I have explored some remarkable buildings and structures that, in different ways, have helped to shed light on the way modern Britain has developed.

I enjoyed dressing in Indian clothes. I loved those long, single-piece garments that come down to the knees and the white pyjamas you wear underneath.

In some of the estates, there are generations of people who have been without work, so the environment and the example passed down generations is the normality of being without work.

A vocation is a noble thing and not to be subverted by the whims of politicians.

Conservatives are wary of change. We have respect for things that have lasted a long time and have been proved to work. When things need changing, we should make the changes with respect to all the reasons why those things worked originally as well as the reasons why amendment is necessary.

What is it about trains that makes food taste so good? Some of my happiest memories are of prolonged lunches between St. Moritz and Zurich, Bordeaux and Paris, and even between Coimbra and Salamanca.

A wood carving of Quixote on his nag Rocinante graced my childhood home.