We never talk about gambling around my house.
We shall have a harder Christmas than we have known since the war.
Unemployment is of vital importance, particularly to the unemployed.
A diplomat is a man who thinks twice before he says nothing.
We will have to embark on a change so radical, a revolution so quiet and yet so total, that it will go far beyond the programme for a parliament
There is no question of any erosion of essential national sovereignty.
I do not often attack the Labour Party, they do it so well themselves.
I don't know why people are so keen to put the details of their private life in public; they forget that invisibility is a superpower.
An owl is the wisest of all birds because the more it sees the the less it talks.
In any communication, or in any situation which you cannot confront because it is exaggerating, hot or aggressive, just change your breath. Breathe through the lips instead of through the nostrils. Exhale always through the nostrils. Inhale through the rolled lips and make it slow and long. It will slow everything as required. It will increase your sensitivity. It will give you 10 times more projection over the person you are talking to.
The key thing in my becoming a writer was going on a Arvon Foundation residential writing course. I took with me a really messy twenty thousand words of something that later became After You'd Gone, my first novel. My tutors were Barbara Trapido and Elspeth Barker.