“I'm not a fan of the working class being mocked, including by some of our famous writers - even those who came from it.”

“The arts stimulate imagination. They provoke thought. And then, having done that, all sorts of other things happen.”

“Dame Barbara Cartland was an endearing eccentric, and when I interviewed her, she wanted me to listen to her dictating to her secretary one of those romantic novels that she turned out fortnightly.”

“Magna Carta has become totemic. It is in the comedy of Tony Hancock, in the poetry of Kipling, never far from the front pages in a constitutional crisis.”

“Is it rather stupid and dangerous to take Magna Carta so much for granted, as many of us seem to do, and to think of this attitude as 'very English?'”

“Christianity also owes me an explanation... For the bigotry, the wickedness, the inhumanity and the wilful ignorance which has also characterized much of its history.”