I do rather rejoice when people come up to talk to me about railways.
— Michael Portillo
As a politician, I spent a lot of time in Washington and New York, cities that are familiar to Europeans.
A vocation is a noble thing and not to be subverted by the whims of politicians.
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.
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.
My Scottish grandfather, John W. Blyth, was a man addicted to paintings. A manufacturer of linen, he spent all his surplus money on pictures.
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.
It's not as if I've ever been to prison or been close to going to prison. The closest I've got is knowing people who have been in jail - after all, I was a member of Parliament - and visiting them there during their sentence.
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.
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?
The true symbolism of every facet of 'Guernica' can only be guessed at, but we do know that it haunted Picasso.
Pablo Picasso first entered my consciousness when I was a boy of about eight years old.
Like so many other grammar schools that flourished in Britain before they were abolished through a mix of ideology and political folly, Harrow County was a fiercely competitive institution, where all boys were taught to strive for excellence. It was precisely because of this demanding regime that results were so good.
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.
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.
It's a dilemma for every modern parent - how to keep children safe on social media without monitoring their every post.
I have liked trains since I was a boy, although I was never a train-spotter.
I love a good meal on a train, and if I'm travelling on a discount ticket, the challenge is to eat more than the price of the fare.
America, to me, is this enormous contrast between the heady idealism of founding fathers such as Thomas Jefferson, who said, 'All men are created equal,' and the reality that he was himself a slave owner.
Personal responsibility matters.
I can never thoroughly appreciate meals on ships because, away from land, I feel my autonomy is restricted.
Television brings with it two dangerous hazards: the worship of celebrity and the blurring of reality and fantasy.
My grandfather, who was always keen to promote living artists, staged an unprecedented exhibition of Peploe's works at Kirkcaldy in 1928.
A wood carving of Quixote on his nag Rocinante graced my childhood home.
What's extraordinary about Cobra Mist, and so much of what went on at Orford, was that the public were completely oblivious to it.
Three letters send a chill down the spine of the enemy: SAS. Those letters spell out one clear message. Don't mess with Britain!
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 all those who experienced it, the Spanish Civil War was devastating.
I look back on my schooldays with a warm glow of nostalgia.
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.
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.'
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.
British-built railways in India helped the British to make money and maintain order; but, as a by-product, they served to unite the country, making it ripe for independence.
Some people are born to trains, and some have trains thrust upon them. Fortunately, I can be included in this latter category.
Leaving politics was a good thing. I was spared a miserable Tory government where I might have ended up as leader.
Here in Britain, we can get a little bit snobby about American history. Yes, their history is not quite as long as ours. But it isn't all that short, either.
Freedom matters.
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.
Were we ever to find ourselves living under a totalitarian regime, place no faith in the mercy of your fellow citizens.
Non-fictionalised accounts of horrific accidents, bereavement, and the outrages of officialdom tend to move us deeply.
I have Spanish ancestry and, indeed, speak the language, up to a point.
I am better at politics than I am at anything else.
The late 1960s was another time and another world.
Oppositions usually say ridiculous things and must embarrassingly then ditch untenable positions.
My eyes are at different levels, and my right ear's a bit bigger than my left - which showed up particularly in school photographs - so my mother used to call me her 'little 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.
Ask anyone where they were when they heard of Diana's death, and they won't hesitate, because nobody can forget. Along with 9/11, it remains the most poleaxeing public event, news so shocking it made me shake, and drove everything else from my mind for days.
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.
Of all the places I've visited in my life, Egypt has been the most fascinating. I've explored almost the whole country: Cairo and the Pyramids, Alexandria, the temples of Luxor and Karnak, the Valleys of the Kings and the Queens and the Nobles.
You never quite know what you do in life that leaves a seed behind that grows into an oak tree.
