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.

Whenever I'm in Edinburgh, which I visit often, I always try to hop on a train to Kirkcaldy to visit the art gallery, where my grandfather was convenor for 36 years, to revisit the marvellous paintings from my childhood - as do other family members.

Leaving politics was a good thing. I was spared a miserable Tory government where I might have ended up as leader.

Politics hasn't changed, but I've changed.

Were we ever to find ourselves living under a totalitarian regime, place no faith in the mercy of your fellow citizens.

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.'

I worry how I look.

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.

One enjoyable consequence of being in the Scouts was that, at the start of each new school year, we had to camp out in tents on the school playing fields.

Sleep deprivation over quite a short period of time can make you paranoid.

There's only one person who knows me - and that's me.

I think a lot of people of my generation have a certain guilt that, from the Sixties onwards, we started taking package holidays abroad and neglected our own country.

If the Tories and Lib Dems fought together, they'd keep their ministerial offices and limousines, and continue to do the right things for the U.K. But too many backbenchers in both parties yearn for Opposition, preferring hallucinogenic ideological purity and political irrelevance to the mucky reality of governing.

For good or ill, communism transformed the globe, but how many of us realise the crucial role played by a Manchester public library - Chethams, the oldest library in the English-speaking world - in the honing of that ideology?

A wood carving of Quixote on his nag Rocinante graced my childhood home.

What is it about trains that makes food taste so good? Some of my happiest memories are of prolonged lunches between St. Moritz and Zurich, Bordeaux and Paris, and even between Coimbra and Salamanca.

Conservatives are wary of change. We have respect for things that have lasted a long time and have been proved to work. When things need changing, we should make the changes with respect to all the reasons why those things worked originally as well as the reasons why amendment is necessary.

A vocation is a noble thing and not to be subverted by the whims of politicians.

In some of the estates, there are generations of people who have been without work, so the environment and the example passed down generations is the normality of being without work.

I enjoyed dressing in Indian clothes. I loved those long, single-piece garments that come down to the knees and the white pyjamas you wear underneath.

From Brighton to Bradford, from Suffolk to Somerset, I have explored some remarkable buildings and structures that, in different ways, have helped to shed light on the way modern Britain has developed.

For 'Portillo's Hidden History of Britain,' I arranged to meet men and women who were witnesses to history - ordinary people who were caught up in extraordinary events.

They say travel enables you to encounter your opposite. If this is true, I think I may have met mine in a shepherd's hut in Transylvania.