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By a strange paradox, a permissive and increasingly unmoral generation has persisted in endowing with moral expectations the Sovereign and the Sovereign's family - Enoch Powell

The lack of success of the cricket team in ordinary times would be seen as part of the ordinary cycle. Now it is being seen as a metaphor for national decline - Bryan Gould, Labour MP

History is littered with dead opinion polls - Ian Lang, Secretary of State for Scotland

Maastricht was a disaster from the beginning, one of those human blunders which combine arrogance and illusion, both too clever by half and too stupid by half - Lord Rees-Mogg

The Archbishop of Canterbury represents the unacceptable face of modern Anglicanism - Auberon Waugh

Violence sells. It is profitable. So strong vested interests are involved. Allied with them are the Stalinist liberals who regard all restraint on what may be read or viewed on screen as intolerable - Lord Deedes on video nasties

Behind every great man is an exhausted woman - Lady Sam Fairbairn, wife of Tory MP Sir Nicholas Fairbairn

We are desperately trying to squeeze every last drop of interest out of an arcane, 16-year-old Arkansas property deal. What wouldn't we give for a Tim Yeo, let alone a Stephen Milligan? - Michael Kinsley, American writer

We cannot pick and choose to which continent we belong - Douglas Hurd

I am very frivolous. I have a shallow nature. I am a flibbertigibbet really, always absorbed in silly detail - Sir John Gielgud