My father had left school at 18, without enough money to go to college - and, with four sons after the war, said he could still not afford to do so.

Dwight D. Eisenhower, in my judgment, will go down in history as one of the four 'great' presidents since the U.S. reluctantly became an empire in World War II; Richard Nixon as the nearest to a sociopath by the time he was compelled to resign.

After university, I taught secondary school for a while and opened a bookshop in Greenwich, just east of London.

My father had risen in the British Army under the revolutionary aegis of General Montgomery, who was mad about training for battle, not muddling into disaster.

Regularly, customers asked for a book on Greenwich, and there was none. After all, Elizabeth I was born there. The Observatory is known all over the world; the Royal Naval College is there. So I decided to do it.

We already have a sabbatical system. It's called opposition, and I've had enough of it.