Leadership is, among other things, the ability to inflict pain and get away with it - short-term pain for long-term gain.

Promoting dependency is the Democratic Party's vocation. It knows that almost all entitlements are forever, and those that are not - e.g., the lifetime eligibility for welfare, repealed in 1996 - are not for the middle class.

If your job is to leaven ordinary lives with elevating spectacle, be elevating or be gone.

Big government inevitably drives an upward distribution of wealth to those whose wealth, confidence and sophistication enable them to manipulate government.

My father had played the guitar when he was young, and my uncle Jack had worked for Kalamazoo, before the war, developing guitar pickups. So there was a kind of family thing about the guitar, although it was considered something of an anomaly then.

In parenthood, there's so much fear around parenting in this day and age, and there's so much fear around technology.

Successive generations of middle-class parents used to foist their own favourite books on their children. But some time in the late Eighties it began to wane - not because children had lost interest in adorable animals but because most of it was available on useful, pacifying video.

National interest is above anything else. Just because you sit in an air-conditioned room, you can say you shouldn't relate cricket and movies to politics. Ask anyone who has lost a family member to terror attacks, and you will get your answer.