I worked for MI6 in the Sixties during the great witch-hunts when the shared paranoia of the Cold War gripped the services.

I was brought up in the War. I was an adolescent in the Second World War. And I did witness in London a great deal of the Blitz.

As to war I am and always was a great enemy at the same time a warrior the greater part of my life and were I young again should still be a warrior while ever this country should be invaded and I lived.

Ideas are the great warriors of the world and a war that has no idea behind it is simply a brutality.

The greatest crime since World War II has been U.S. foreign policy.

The west has a great deal to answer for in the Middle East from Britain's belated empire-building after the First World War to the US and British policy that condemns modern Iraq to the material and social squalor of a half-century ago.

Henry Kissinger is the greatest living war criminal in the world today with the blood of millions of people in Vietnam and Cambodia and Laos and Chile and East Timor on his hands. He will never appear in a court or be behind bars.

I was going to be a great woman novelist. Then the war came along and I think it's hard for young people today don't you to realize that when World War II happened we were dying to go and help our country.

Al Jazeera aired a new tape of Osama bin Laden. It was the usual stuff he called Bush evil the Great Satan called him a war monger. Basically the same thing you heard at last night's Democratic debate.

As you may recall Truman was extremely unpopular when he finally left Washington in 1953 thanks largely to the Korean War. Today however he is thought to have been a solidly good president a 'Near Great' even in the terminology of those surveys of historians they do every now and then.