We in Britain do not have the same capabilities as the United States, but we are members of the United Nations Security Council. And we take our obligations and duties deriving from that very seriously.
Anyone, they say, is entitled to change his mind. Not about the defence of Britain, you're not. You either feel it in your heart, in your bones, in your gut, or you don't.
I'm vain.
I worry how I look.
My own father was a refugee from the Spanish civil war in the 1930s, later going on to become a BBC radio producer after World War II.
As a politician, I spent a lot of time in Washington and New York, cities that are familiar to Europeans.
Were we ever to find ourselves living under a totalitarian regime, place no faith in the mercy of your fellow citizens.
The late 1960s was another time and another world.
I love a good meal on a train, and if I'm travelling on a discount ticket, the challenge is to eat more than the price of the fare.
Here in Britain, we can get a little bit snobby about American history. Yes, their history is not quite as long as ours. But it isn't all that short, either.
If a prince marries a foreign princess, one to the manner born, he is being snobbish and old-fashioned. If he chooses a Diana or a Fergie, glamorous outsiders, they may never adapt to the restrictions of being Royal, with calamitous results.
I am better at politics than I am at anything else.
Ask anyone where they were when they heard of Diana's death, and they won't hesitate, because nobody can forget. Along with 9/11, it remains the most poleaxeing public event, news so shocking it made me shake, and drove everything else from my mind for days.
King Edward VIII was forced to abdicate because he was determined to marry a divorced woman. As a result of that decision, the Queen's father, George VI, was obliged to lead the country through a war that threatened its survival, with all the personal pain portrayed in 'The King's Speech.'
In any family, the joy of a wedding must be tinged with a little anxiety. So many marriages fail. Luckily, people often get over such traumas. But for the Royal Family, marriages carry the gravest dangers.
Before my teens, my contemporaries were reading Tolkien and were absorbed by his works, but try as I might, I could not be drawn in, perhaps as something in me resists the epic, medieval-feeling fantasy.
Sleep deprivation over quite a short period of time can make you paranoid.
Television brings with it two dangerous hazards: the worship of celebrity and the blurring of reality and fantasy.
I can never thoroughly appreciate meals on ships because, away from land, I feel my autonomy is restricted.
The stakes are high in politics.
