It took me some years to clear my head of what Paris wanted me to admire about it, and to notice what I preferred instead. Not power-ridden monuments, but individual buildings which tell a quieter story: the artist's studio, or the Belle Epoque house built by a forgotten financier for a just-remembered courtesan.

To look at ourselves from afar, to make the subjective suddenly objective: this gives us a psychic shock.

Reading and life are not separate but symbiotic. And for this serious task of imaginative discovery and self-discovery, there is and remains one perfect symbol: the printed book.

As I've explained to my wife many times, you have to kill your wife or mistress to get on the front page of the papers.

Death is the beginning of something.

My objection to the death penalty is based on the idea that this is a democracy, and in a democracy the government is me, and if the government kills somebody then I'm killing somebody.

When I first came into parliament, there was, on average, a by-election every three months - due not to MPs bailing out, but because of the death rate.

Neither the sun nor death can be looked at with a steady eye.