“Free-flow play is not compulsory, but there is a belief across lots of nurseries that it is.”

When I started my ministerial job I brought my daughters into the Department, due to last-minute childcare complications.

When I travel around the country, I see great companies with new ideas and a can-do attitude. But too often they are in hand-to-hand and pen-to-paper combat with officialdom.

All of my parents’ friends worked in public sector jobs.

We spent a lot of time talking about politics at home. We went to the camp at Greenham Common.

If we just had an election which is a kind of desiccated calculation, obviously I think the Conservatives have the best economic plans, but it is about more than that. It is about the overall person.

Opinion polls show that millennials are focused, aspirational and entrepreneurial.

We are fighting a Labour Party whose avowed enemy is capitalist bosses, whose instinct is to see income as a common pool resource, and whose leading figures find profit morally repugnant.

The US is our largest trading partner and increasing transatlantic trade can help our economies bounce back from the economic challenge posed by coronavirus.

If John McDonnell nationalised whole industries, they would be quickly taken over by bureaucrats more concerned about their careers than about customers.

We’re trendsetters, first to welcome brilliant inventions into our lives, from the microwave meal to Instagram.

I want Britain to lead the world in food and farming and to do that we need enough productive agricultural land.

I think there’s a danger in politics of being too risk-averse.

And I observe that for the vast majority of the Labour government we had a top rate of 40 per cent income tax. It’s now higher, and I think we should look to get to a simpler, lower tax system.

What you notice in French nurseries is just how calm they are. All of their classes are structured and led by teachers. It’s a requirement.

I didn’t become a Tory just to become part of a managerial group who wanted to run the country…

Britain is a nation of Uber-riding, Deliveroo-eating, Airbnb-ing freedom fighters.

To write as if your life depended on it; to write across the chalkboard, putting up there in public the words you have dredged; sieved up in dreams, from behind screen memories, out of silence– words you have dreaded and needed in order to know you exist.

As I go across the country and privately visit women’s shelters and counselling centres.

These objects were sometimes just 12 inches across yet needed enough detail to fill a movie screen.

You taste something from St. George, even across categories – the gin, the whisky – it tastes like something from St. George. It’s the same as going to a great bar:

Reading across three languages is a way for me to diversify my intake as a reader, not to tunnel into certain categories or demographics.

Zachary Macaulay, who once traveled on a slave ship across the Atlantic, taking notes.

Millions cheer the warriorspilling blood across the ringwhile the one who stands for peaceis ridiculed and shamed.

Well, sometimes if I go out to dinner with my family, people will come up to me and put their hand across my plate for me to shake, sometimes when I have a bite of food in my mouth.