Prince Philip had formally 'retired' in the summer of 2017, a couple of months after his 96th birthday, because the Queen encouraged him to do so. She wanted to stop him 'pushing himself all the time'. She had become anxious about him.
During the summer of 2000, in the run-up to Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother's 100th birthday, I asked the Duke of Edinburgh if he was hoping to reach 100. 'Good God, no,' he spluttered, 'I can't imagine anything worse. What a ghastly idea.'
I had to pull about twenty pieces of broken glass out of my hand using tweezers and antiseptic cream. I'm never going to have a game of arm wrestling with Michael Howard again.
If you'd spent your life being called "Gyles Brandreth", you would crawl across broken glass to achieve the bliss, the simplicity, the purity, the joy of simply being called "Bob".
On the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government: I think it should be made clear that the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats, they have not got into bed together; they are merely sharing a room.
I describe what I do on the day that I do it. The nice thing for me is that I do lots of different things on lots of different days.
I get to my desk at eight in the morning and I leave it at seven in the evening and I just work away. I'm a work machine.
One of the interesting things about writing a play is that when you've finished it you have to give it away.
I've been keeping a diary since I was about 11. If you don't keep a diary everything washes away. And you can live everything three times: you live it when you live it, you live it when you write it down, and you live it a third time when you re-read it. Though I have to say rereading my diary for publication was a depressing experience. You shouldn't look back.
Backbenchers are devalued. Their role is diminished. No-one even knows who they are unless they turn up on the front page of a newspaper because the taxpayer has been footing the bill for their duck house.
Lewis Carroll is somebody who wore different hats. He was a clergyman, a mathematician, a teacher. He wrote serious books, and amazing children's books. He was a photographer. So like most people, he was many people in one skin. Creatively, he made a greater impact than almost any other Victorian, and yet we know next to nothing about him, we just fall back on the old cliché.