For good or ill, communism transformed the globe, but how many of us realise the crucial role played by a Manchester public library - Chethams, the oldest library in the English-speaking world - in the honing of that ideology?

If the Tories and Lib Dems fought together, they'd keep their ministerial offices and limousines, and continue to do the right things for the U.K. But too many backbenchers in both parties yearn for Opposition, preferring hallucinogenic ideological purity and political irrelevance to the mucky reality of governing.

I think a lot of people of my generation have a certain guilt that, from the Sixties onwards, we started taking package holidays abroad and neglected our own country.

There's only one person who knows me - and that's me.

Sleep deprivation over quite a short period of time can make you paranoid.

One enjoyable consequence of being in the Scouts was that, at the start of each new school year, we had to camp out in tents on the school playing fields.

Anyone, they say, is entitled to change his mind. Not about the defence of Britain, you're not. You either feel it in your heart, in your bones, in your gut, or you don't.

I worry how I look.

King Edward VIII was forced to abdicate because he was determined to marry a divorced woman. As a result of that decision, the Queen's father, George VI, was obliged to lead the country through a war that threatened its survival, with all the personal pain portrayed in 'The King's Speech.'

Were we ever to find ourselves living under a totalitarian regime, place no faith in the mercy of your fellow citizens.

Politics hasn't changed, but I've changed.

Leaving politics was a good thing. I was spared a miserable Tory government where I might have ended up as leader.

Whenever I'm in Edinburgh, which I visit often, I always try to hop on a train to Kirkcaldy to visit the art gallery, where my grandfather was convenor for 36 years, to revisit the marvellous paintings from my childhood - as do other family members.

I'm a man with a great political future behind me.

In any family, the joy of a wedding must be tinged with a little anxiety. So many marriages fail. Luckily, people often get over such traumas. But for the Royal Family, marriages carry the gravest dangers.

A parliamentary democracy that has developed its delicate balances over hundreds of years will not give up its sovereign rights.

Our situations... are very different. The nature of our politics is different. I don't deny, though, that political cycles, which are observable in the United States, are sometimes observable here.

My own father was a refugee from the Spanish civil war in the 1930s, later going on to become a BBC radio producer after World War II.

People wear extraordinarily bright colours in India.

People have said to me, 'Oh, you are much nicer making documentaries than you were in politics.' So I should be. If you are making a documentary, you are having fun. You are not under any pressure, normally.

The two biggest legacies of the Raj are the unification of India and the English language. Moreover, without the railways, India would not have been connected and could not have become one country.

Freedom matters.

Again and again, people get more conservative as they get older.

Pablo Picasso first entered my consciousness when I was a boy of about eight years old.