Fear of death has never played a large part in my consciousness - perhaps unimaginative of me..

I was once naïve enough to ask the late Duke of Devonshire why he liked the town of Eastbourne. He replied with a self-deprecating shrug that one of….

The latest research has revealed that women have a higher IQ than men..

This book has been a catalogue of mistakes by politicians, moral and practical disasters which led to wars, enslavement and wretchedness on a scale w….

We cannot hope for a society in which formal organized religion dies out. But we can stop behaving as if it was worthy of our collective respect..

I suppose if I'd got a brilliant first and done research I might still be a don today, but I hope not. People become dons because they are incapable ….

I do not find it easy to articulate thoughts about religion. I remain the sort of person who turns off 'Thought for the Day' when it comes on the rad….

Nearly all monster stories depend for their success on Jack killing the Giant, Beowulf or St. George slaying the Dragon, Harry Potter triumphing over….

In general, Hitler embodied the view of any popular newspaper..

The Royal Family are not like you and me. They live in houses so big that you can walk round all day and never need to meet your spouse. The Queen an….

IQ in general has improved since tests first began. Psychologists think that this is because modern life becomes ever more complicated..

I'm not saying all publishers have to be literary, but some interest in books would help..

My kind publishers, Toby Mundy and Margaret Stead of Atlantic Books, have commissioned me to write the life of Queen Victoria..

It would no doubt be very sentimental to argue - but I would argue it nevertheless - that the peculiar combination of joy and sadness in bell music -….

The really clever people now want to be lawyers or journalists..

Everyone writes in Tolstoy's shadow, whether one feels oneself to be Tolstoyan or not..

My belief has come about in large measure because of the lives and examples of people I have known - not the famous, not saints, but friends and rela….

I don't write books inadvertently..

It is hard to think of anything which more tragically and clearly exemplifies the phenomenon of good political intentions achieving the precise oppos….

I think I became a Catholic to annoy my father..