“The spiritually starving hesitate to partake of the Spirit like a child’s reaction to new and strange food. They must be offered a tiny bite on a spoon.”

Without accountability, there can be no freedom. I know it seems like a paradox.

It’s nice that the independent scene is taken seriously, and has been.

I love horses. I spent seven years as a racing commissioner on a horse-racing board.

I think if you’re going to make political art, you have to engage at some level. You can’t just write about politics, you have to try and be politics as well.

It would shine a torch into the dirty little corner where the BNP defecate on our democracy, and that would be much more powerful than duffing them up in the street – which Im also in favour of.

That’s what I’m about — getting engaged. Too many people don’t wade in the mud with the politicians.

Mixing pop and politics he asks me what the use is / I offer him embarrassment and my usual excuses.

I want to like my music before you like it. I don’t want to sell anything that I don’t really like.

So, in some ways, the political songs tend to be a bit more like reportage, whereas the love songs tend to be like novels, you can pick them up off the shelf and go into them any time.

Christianity is the only true and perfect religion; and… in proportion as mankind adopt its principles and obey its precepts, they will be wise and happy.

[A]s long as you’re comfortable it feels like freedom.

Part of the problem with some elements of the European debate is that they hanker for the days when we were a great power. Those days are gone, and they went a long time ago.

Whether we like it or not, we live in a post-ideological world. That’s how a Donald Trump can get through. He has no ideology at all: in that sense, he’s a bit like Mussolini.

War what is it good for? It’s good for business.

Just because you’re gay, I won’t turn you away. If you stick around, I’m sure we can find some common ground.

Don’t saddle me with your ideals, and spare me all your guilt. For a poet with all the answers, has never yet been built.

Grub first, then ethics.

Good manners: The noise you don’t make when you’re eating soup.

Banquet: a plate of cold, hairy chicken and artificially coloured green peas completely surrounded by dreary speeches and appeals for donations.

The champagne was flowing like the Potomac in flood.

To a historian libraries are food, shelter, and even muse. They are of two kinds: the library of published material, books, pamphlets, periodicals, and the archive of unpublished papers and documents.

The motto of West African cooking is that if the food doesn’t set fire to the tablecloth the cook is being stingy with the pepper.

I don’t really cook meat. I eat a bit of seafood but I’m not really into meat and the idea of cooking it is pretty intense.

The small things of life were often so much bigger than the great things . . . the trivial pleasure like cooking, one’s home, little poems especially sad ones, solitary walks, funny things seen and overheard.