Quotes from Andrew Marr

In the end, does it really matter if newspapers physically disappear? Probably not: the world is always changing. But does it matter if organisations independent enough and rich enough to employ journalists to do their job disappear? Yes, that matters hugely; it affects the whole of life and society.

History is either a moral argument with lessons for the here-and-now, or it is merely an accumulation of pointless facts.

The left tended to think people's private lives should be their own, even if they made choices traditional Christian society regarded as immoral; but that people's working lives, from how much they earned to where they worked, were fit for State interference. The right had a reverse view, that the State should uphold traditional moral codes with the full rigour of the law, but keep out of the economy as much as possible.

So although they might stare at us and ask, 'Who are these alien people?' We could reply, 'We are you, What you chose to become.

For Reuter, it was the last act of the Great War and something which reduced, if it did not remove, the shame of defeat and surrender. The message, for those who chose to think about it, was that Germany was down but not out - defeated but not reconciled.

The one economic medicine so bitter that no minister in the seventies had thought of trying it was duly uncorked and poured into the spoon. It was time for Britain to grimace and open her mouth.

My dream is that by returning to our not-so-distant history, I might remind readers why, with all its faults, this is a lucky place to be living in, and one we can be quietly proud of.

Androgynous fashion, long hair, the Pill, a new interest in the inner psychological life - an unabashed sloppiness, if you will - really marks the sixties. It was when Britain went girlie. And what do girls do? Girls shop.

The great background question about the Labour governments of the sixties is whether with a stronger leader they could have gripped the country's big problems and dealt with them. How did it happen that a cabinet of such brilliant, such clever and self-confident people achieved so little? In part, it was the effect of the whirling court politics demonstrated by 'In Place of Strife'.

When they finally went home, they left behind an unstable, unhappy part of the world, with borders like wounds scored across it.

Science strides ahead; politics stumbles around like a drunk. We saw it in the age of discovery and the age of empire, but it was particularly glaring in the twentieth century – and, I would add (so far), the twenty-first too.

The death-tolls during the last years of the Qing dynasty and in China's forty years of non-Communist republican government are impossible to be precise about, but the figures are estimated to be very large.

The Chinese death-toll in the chaotic fighting of the Second World War has been estimated at around twenty million, outstripping by far every other nation except the Soviet Union.

Gutenberg had died after inventing Europe's first real printing press. The Chinese and Koreans had long used wood-block printing, and even ceramic printing.

To what extent was this David Cameron's fault? It's hard to think of a more complete definition of political failure than an essentially pro-EU Prime Minister who plots to defeat his enemies on the right, and by doing so ejects his country from the EU by mistake,

being sacked. Major's hopes for central regulation withering away echo Lenin, who hoped for a 'withering away' of the Soviet

all those roads and ports, spread these belief systems faster. Some seem to have mingled ancient beliefs with Buddhist and Hindu thinking – the 'New Age' faiths of two millennia

It seems that after the African migration, small numbers of Homo sapiens were better adapted to manage these shifts in climate than earlier versions of human had been. If so, this happened not because of classic Darwinian evolution (there wasn't time) but because of the accelerated development caused by culture – language, learning, copying, remembering.

Man is simply man, and there's nothing that can be done with him. There is no evolution. There is one very simple law, the law of the conservation of violence. It's as simple as the law of the conservation of energy. Violence is eternal, no matter what is done to destroy it. It does not disappear or diminish; it can only change shape.

Nesses estúdios decorria muita colaboração; conta-nos Vasari que quando, certo dia, Leonardo pintou um anjo numa obra de Verrocchio e se saiu melhor que o mestre, Verrocchio desistiu pura e simplesmente do pincel e deixou de pintar. Já fora ultrapassado.

Philip had warned the Spartans that if he brought his armies successfully into their territory he would destroy their cities and kill all their people. They replied, rather magnificently, with the single word 'If'.

Alternatively, the railway could be split vertically, so that the State owned the track, some companies owned the stations, and others the trains. This could be called the Complete Horlicks option.

If you doubt how far our civilization has turned into a helpless self domesticated livestock, just look at the world around you

Siberia is also a rich source of iron, tin, gold and other metals, and possesses the world's deepest lake, Baikal.