Marriage is like a three-speed gearbox - affection, friendship, love. It is not advisable to crash your gears and go right through to love straightaway. You need to ease your way through. The basis of love is respect, and that needs to be learned from affection and friendship.

I'm convinced there's a small room in the attic of the Foreign Office where future diplomats are taught to stammer.

I imagine hell like this: Italian punctuality, German humour and English wine.

Parents are the bones on which children cut their teeth.

Because they have been in love they have survived everything that life could throw at them, even their own failures.

Corruption is nature's way of restoring our faith in democracy.