"In an ideal world, it would not take a film star to get the media focused on mental illness."

"My closest friend, who died not long ago, is buried near Marx's grave in Highgate cemetery, so I see the gaggle of admirers laying roses at the foot of his tombstone regularly. I have never been tempted to leave flowers there myself. Great theories, shame about the practice. Marx did many things. But inventing class was not one of them."

"So here is one of my theories on happiness: we cannot know if we have lived a truly happy life until the very end. This view of life and death was reinforced by my close witnessing of the buildup to the death of Philip Gould. Philip was without doubt my closest friend in politics. When he died, I felt like I had lost a limb."

"The bad news for journalists today is that the media, however seriously people who are in the public eye take it, is not taken as seriously as it once was - by the public."

"It's very strange that most people don't care if their knowledge of their family history only goes back three generations."

"The virtue of privacy is one that must be protected in matters that are intimate and within one's own family."

"It's in the history books, the Holocaust. It's just a phrase. And the truth is it happened yesterday. It happened to my mother. I never met my grandmothers or my grandfathers. They were all wiped up in the gas chambers of Nazi Germany."

"My father always wanted to be the corpse at every funeral, the bride at every wedding and the baby at every christening."