The safest period of my lifetime was the Cold War, when Europe was more sharply divided than ever.

Without doubt, the Queen's personal acceptance of her role as a loyal E.U. servant was one of the great symbolic moments of our history. A bit like Magna Carta, but backwards.

When I lived in the suburbs of Washington, D.C., I was rather proud that my landlord was almost the only African-American in my unofficially segregated neighbourhood (the other one was the adopted child of our admirable next-door neighbours).

I still don't understand why we need a gigantic airport sprawled across South East England. What does it gain us, compared with the misery of noise, pollution and congestion it causes in our cramped country? Would it really be so bad if we had to take a train to Paris or Amsterdam to fly to the U.S.A.?

Work, especially if you're lucky in what you do, is one of the great pleasures of life, but - like all pleasures - it can become selfish.

The Left have always preferred the state to the family.

Average male pay is higher than average female pay for a simple reason. Despite decades of enforced equality, women still have babies, and men still don't. So women who wish to spend any substantial time at all with their own offspring will fall behind in their careers, and their earnings will be less.

Instead of trying to bring freedom to the Arab world, couldn't we just concentrate on trying to fend off the European Union and defending our own porous borders?

Freedom of speech, for those who don't accept multiculturalism or the sexual revolution, is increasingly limited, mainly by threats to the jobs of those who speak out of turn.

If you are foolish enough to defend your own home against burglary, expect to be arrested, fingerprinted, DNA-swabbed, and probably charged.

A serious dose of unemployment and a spate of bank failures can make the unelectable electable quite quickly.

I'm always a bit suspicious of the sort of person who argues by saying 'What would Jesus have said?' They usually mean that they are quite sure Jesus would have agreed with them.

Nowhere in the Beatitudes did Jesus say, 'Blessed are the queue-jumpers,' trying to gain an advantage at the expense of others. This is what the people at Calais are.

The giant fraud that is Britain's education system strides ever onwards, messing up many more lives than it improves.

If it's for everyone, it's not exclusive.

All serious elite institutions, from the great London clubs to the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party, have always made sure that most people can't get into them. That's the point.

What we need and have not got at Westminster are real experience and wisdom, possessed by people who do not view politics as a career.

Britain is a desirable place to live mainly because it is an island, which most people can't get to.

Most of the really successful civilisations survived because they were protected from invasion by mountains, sea, deserts, or a combination of these things. Ask the Russians or the Poles what it's like to live without the shield of the sea.

Do not underestimate Jeremy Corbyn.

I dislike many of Mr Corbyn's opinions - his belief in egalitarianism and high taxation, his enthusiasm for comprehensive schools, his readiness to talk to terrorists, and his support for the E.U.

I've grown tired of people impersonating world-weary cynics by intoning the old saying 'My enemy's enemy is my friend' as if it were a new-minted witticism.

Comprehensive schools, as too few understand, have never been designed to improve education.

The Church of England hasn't often produced great men in modern times. But I have long believed that George Bell, Bishop of Chichester from 1929 to 1958, was such a man.

Real conservatives are in favour of all kinds of unelected power and authority.

I wonder how many illegal migrants fanned out across the country while I and others were subjected to the stone-faced, suspicious inefficiency of the Border Force?

Terror works by surprise.

All we have and are is based on the Christian faith, which has shaped law, government, morals, music, landscape, and education here for a thousand years.

Every educated and intelligent person glories in the freedom of women in Western societies to exercise their talents to the full and their freedom to walk safely in the streets of our great cities.

If migrants from other cultures arrive too fast and in numbers too great for society to absorb and integrate them, they begin to impose those cultures on the host country.

Radical multicultural types will, in the end, destroy the things they claim to like, because they don't understand that liberty and reasonable equality are features of stable, free, conservative societies based on Christian ideas, which guard their borders and are proud of their civilisation.

How I shall miss Alan Rickman, his beautiful command of English, and a voice he played like a musical instrument.

Direct Grants, private schools which took huge numbers of state pupils, involved effective co-operation between state and private sectors - a thing all modern governments claim they want. So why were they abolished? And why aren't they now restored?

Revolutions are all based on the false idea that humans and their nature can be changed.

I ride a bicycle daily in London and have done for many years.

If you are funny, people will like you. A lot of advertising is based on this simple rule. The Tory MP Boris Johnson has benefited a lot from it.

If you claim to represent and speak for the people, and they are forced to pay your salary, you have a duty to experience life as near as possible to the way others live it.

Female politicos mostly represent a rather militant faction.

I can't say I'm sorry to see that the name 'Nigel' is dying out, but I'd be happier if it wasn't being replaced by made-up names out of TV series 'Game Of Thrones.'

You can't buy class.

Nobody is the same. If we were all the same it would be bloody boring.

For the first 18 months of Joy Division, we used our jobs to fund the band. We'd all chip in three, five quid to go and do a gig. But it was worth it. It was amazing we could afford to feed ourselves. But we were so creatively and artistically satisfied. You can't explain that to somebody who's never been there.

Originally, I didn't play any New Order when I deejayed. I suppose it comes from being a little embarrassed or humble or whatever. But people were coming to see me because of New Order, so in the end, I had to realize that if they were using my name on the poster, then maybe I should play some of the music.

I've watched so-called 'New Order' playing in Auckland, and Tom Chapman is miming along to my bass on tape... He's got his fingers on the low, and you can hear my high bass in the background. So he's miming.

I'd rather have ten people who are mad for it than ten thousand who aren't.

I've stayed in hotels where you were scared to even put your feet on the floor, or had to sleep in a chair.

You don't get many chances in the world, and you don't want to throw them away.

At my age, I only travel business class because I just don't bend anymore; my body can't cope with it.

The worst words I could ever hear as a bass player was, 'Can you play the root notes?'

There are so little outtakes from the Joy Division era. We didn't have much money. You couldn't be very generous in recording, so we were very thrifty in how we recorded. Everything was very, very well looked after financially because we just couldn't afford it.