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

"I am an optimist, unrepentant and militant. After all, in order not to be a fool an optimist must know how sad a place the world can be. It is only the pessimist who finds this out anew every day."

"The point of living, and of being an optimist, is to be foolish enough to believe the best is yet to come."

"There are no old men any more. Playboy" and Penthouse" have between them made an ideal of eternal adolescence, sunburnt and saunaed, with the grey dorianed out of it."

People at the top of the tree are those without qualifications to detain them at the bottom.