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.

For all those who experienced it, the Spanish Civil War was devastating.

The advantage of trains over planes is that there is much less hassle. You can get up from your seat and stroll about; you're more likely to meet people, and, particularly if you're making a long journey, you can actually see the terrain.

My eyes are at different levels, and my right ear's a bit bigger than my left - which showed up particularly in school photographs - so my mother used to call me her 'little Picasso.'

As a presenter, you have to speak with artificial energy and enthusiasm.

British-built railways in India helped the British to make money and maintain order; but, as a by-product, they served to unite the country, making it ripe for independence.

There's much about the British Raj which I think is disreputable. It was rapacious; it was a sort of kleptocracy, and it was also racist. Indians were not treated as equals.

Non-fictionalised accounts of horrific accidents, bereavement, and the outrages of officialdom tend to move us deeply.

Like so many other grammar schools that flourished in Britain before they were abolished through a mix of ideology and political folly, Harrow County was a fiercely competitive institution, where all boys were taught to strive for excellence. It was precisely because of this demanding regime that results were so good.

The stakes are high in politics.

One of the reasons that Thatcher promoted home ownership is that it promoted responsible citizens with a stake in society. But another reason was that those people would tend to be Conservative.

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.

I hope I succeed in demonstrating that you may equally find compelling and significant narratives - stories that alter or add to our understanding of history - in unprepossessing places: a Victorian sewer system; a Cold War bunker; derelict hospitals.

Few people have heard of John Hawkshaw, the engineer responsible for Brighton's sewers, but he also built the Severn Tunnel and parts of the London Underground system. Such figures, largely forgotten now, conceived an infrastructure that was perfect in its fine detail and intended to last for a century or more - as it has.

For someone like me, making a documentary - I don't kid myself. There's no influence at all. What I do is entertainment. I would even say much the same about the column I write in 'The Sunday Times.'

The truth is a good thing.

British-built railways in India helped the British to make money and maintain order and, as a by-product, served to unite the country, ripe for independence.

Oppositions usually say ridiculous things and must embarrassingly then ditch untenable positions.

Some people are born to trains, and some have trains thrust upon them. Fortunately, I can be included in this latter category.

Of all the places I've visited in my life, Egypt has been the most fascinating. I've explored almost the whole country: Cairo and the Pyramids, Alexandria, the temples of Luxor and Karnak, the Valleys of the Kings and the Queens and the Nobles.

America, to me, is this enormous contrast between the heady idealism of founding fathers such as Thomas Jefferson, who said, 'All men are created equal,' and the reality that he was himself a slave owner.

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.

I'm nothing to do with the Conservative Party; I'm not a member of the Conservative Party. I stopped being a member shortly after I stopped being a member of Parliament and I took up a career as a broadcaster.

If you are a fan of my BBC series 'Great Continental Railway Journeys,' you'll probably not be surprised to learn that one of my great aspirations is to travel on Egypt's railways.

The true symbolism of every facet of 'Guernica' can only be guessed at, but we do know that it haunted Picasso.

I don't mind being a bit of a showman.

The late 1960s was another time and another world.

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.

Television brings with it two dangerous hazards: the worship of celebrity and the blurring of reality and fantasy.

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.

As a politician, I spent a lot of time in Washington and New York, cities that are familiar to Europeans.

If, like me, you're interested in history, Egypt is a place of wonders. It's the land of many civilisations, including Greek, Roman, Christian, and Muslim.

I have liked trains since I was a boy, although I was never a train-spotter.

It's a dilemma for every modern parent - how to keep children safe on social media without monitoring their every post.

We must have a welfare system that we can afford, which will mean giving greater attention to directing the welfare program toward its primary purposes and its intended beneficiaries.

I can never thoroughly appreciate meals on ships because, away from land, I feel my autonomy is restricted.

I am better at politics than I am at anything else.

I'm vain.

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.

Pablo Picasso first entered my consciousness when I was a boy of about eight years old.

Again and again, people get more conservative as they get older.

Freedom matters.

The two biggest legacies of the Raj are the unification of India and the English language. Moreover, without the railways, India would not have been connected and could not have become one country.

People have said to me, 'Oh, you are much nicer making documentaries than you were in politics.' So I should be. If you are making a documentary, you are having fun. You are not under any pressure, normally.

People wear extraordinarily bright colours in India.

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.

Our situations... are very different. The nature of our politics is different. I don't deny, though, that political cycles, which are observable in the United States, are sometimes observable here.

A parliamentary democracy that has developed its delicate balances over hundreds of years will not give up its sovereign rights.

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.

I'm a man with a great political future behind me.