If a prince marries a foreign princess, one to the manner born, he is being snobbish and old-fashioned. If he chooses a Diana or a Fergie, glamorous outsiders, they may never adapt to the restrictions of being Royal, with calamitous results.

I'm vain.

I am better at politics than I am at anything else.

I can never thoroughly appreciate meals on ships because, away from land, I feel my autonomy is restricted.

We must have a welfare system that we can afford, which will mean giving greater attention to directing the welfare program toward its primary purposes and its intended beneficiaries.

It's a dilemma for every modern parent - how to keep children safe on social media without monitoring their every post.

I have liked trains since I was a boy, although I was never a train-spotter.

If, like me, you're interested in history, Egypt is a place of wonders. It's the land of many civilisations, including Greek, Roman, Christian, and Muslim.

As a politician, I spent a lot of time in Washington and New York, cities that are familiar to Europeans.

We in Britain do not have the same capabilities as the United States, but we are members of the United Nations Security Council. And we take our obligations and duties deriving from that very seriously.

Television brings with it two dangerous hazards: the worship of celebrity and the blurring of reality and fantasy.

Before my teens, my contemporaries were reading Tolkien and were absorbed by his works, but try as I might, I could not be drawn in, perhaps as something in me resists the epic, medieval-feeling fantasy.

The late 1960s was another time and another world.

I don't mind being a bit of a showman.

The true symbolism of every facet of 'Guernica' can only be guessed at, but we do know that it haunted Picasso.

If you are a fan of my BBC series 'Great Continental Railway Journeys,' you'll probably not be surprised to learn that one of my great aspirations is to travel on Egypt's railways.

I'm nothing to do with the Conservative Party; I'm not a member of the Conservative Party. I stopped being a member shortly after I stopped being a member of Parliament and I took up a career as a broadcaster.

Ask anyone where they were when they heard of Diana's death, and they won't hesitate, because nobody can forget. Along with 9/11, it remains the most poleaxeing public event, news so shocking it made me shake, and drove everything else from my mind for days.

America, to me, is this enormous contrast between the heady idealism of founding fathers such as Thomas Jefferson, who said, 'All men are created equal,' and the reality that he was himself a slave owner.

Of all the places I've visited in my life, Egypt has been the most fascinating. I've explored almost the whole country: Cairo and the Pyramids, Alexandria, the temples of Luxor and Karnak, the Valleys of the Kings and the Queens and the Nobles.

Some people are born to trains, and some have trains thrust upon them. Fortunately, I can be included in this latter category.

Oppositions usually say ridiculous things and must embarrassingly then ditch untenable positions.

British-built railways in India helped the British to make money and maintain order and, as a by-product, served to unite the country, ripe for independence.

The truth is a good thing.