Michael Portillo

“The stakes are high in politics.”

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

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

“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.”

“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?”

“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.”

“Personal responsibility matters.”

“When you are being interviewed by Jeremy Paxman, you are the prisoner in the dock: assumed guilty unless proved innocent, under intense pressure, on the defensive. There are very few people who can look relaxed in that position.”

“I do rather rejoice when people come up to talk to me about railways.”

“'Bradshaw's' is a lovely device for the time-travelling television presenter. I just hope that people buying it aren't doing so with the intention of plotting a tour of 21st-century Europe. They'll find quite a lot has changed since 1913.”

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

“I don't know why, but I think the eating of food is hugely enhanced when you do it on a train. Even a simple steak and chips, when the world is rushing past outside, can take you to heaven.”

“To be in the media is to be in the wings. Being in politics is being on the stage.”

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

“Wagner had a terrific understanding of politics. In 1829, he was a Marxist revolutionary who wanted to bring down the establishment. He hated religion and churches, which he said enslaved people. But he later developed different views that put art at the centre of the life of the state.”

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

“No restaurant, however brilliantly situated, can give you the constantly changing views that you can see from a railway. Revolving restaurants at the tops of tall buildings try to compete, but spinning around is no substitute for speeding along.”

“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.”

“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.”

“My father was possessed of an extraordinary romantic idealism, an unwavering belief in certain principles. He was always talking about the past. Always. Of course, it has a powerful effect on me.”