We're not close. We're different people, we have different lives, we have entirely different pleasures, we live in different continents. If we weren'… - Peter Hitchens

[The Conservative party] is a machine for obtaining power. It would cheerfully guillotine the Queen in Trafalgar Square, if it thought that by doing so it could keep or gain office. That is why it has spent the past 20 years becoming more Blairite than New Labour.

Donald Trump is a symptom, not a disease. The disease is the death of real political conservatism: a cool, intelligent reluctance to believe that all change is good, a love for the established, the particular and the well-worn. During the 1980s, many people mistook Thatcherism and Reaganism, actually a wild form of liberalism, for conservatism. They lapped up the temporary riches it provided and now find themselves yearning for leaders to take them back to a world of secure jobs and secure borders.

To anyone brought up when English literature, scripture, liturgy, poetry and hymns were still taught and learned, it is astonishing to find out how little they have in common with those who were raised and educated in the post-revolutionary culture. The pre-revolutionary survivor can finish other people's sentences, detect the rhythm in other people's speeches, recognise a score of allusions in a page of print. There is hardly a word or phrase which does not awake a richer thought, or an echo of something hauntingly similar. (p. 196)