‘The British body politic, once so widely imitated throughout the world, now resembles an empty husk’

‘Our societies have been sustained by the silent majority and by the institutional structures that survived from a more self-confident past. Now these structures too are falling apart’

‘To dignify the thugs of the "Real" and "Continuity" IRA with the name of dissident is to insult real heroes like Sakharov, Solzhenitsyn, Sharansky, and Bukovsky’

‘The decision to ban Wilders was the desperate diktat of ministers who have lost sight of the distinction between arbitrary government and the rule of law’

‘Having banished the West's Judaeo-Christian heritage, we are now investing the advent of Barack Obama with a quasi-messianic significance that no American president can possibly fulfill’

‘It is not inevitable that Western values will remain pre-eminent, but the decline of the West is a self-fulfilling prophecy and for that reason alone must be rejected’

‘Mr Obama subscribes to the European critique of the Bush administration, but the self-abasement that the critics demand from America is as implausible as it is undesirable’

‘Even in the midst of financial turmoil, the West still needs defending’

‘The crisis in the Caucasus has undoubtedly ushered in a period of global insecurity’

‘Gray knew what it meant to speak in prose, in an era when it is not the love of money but contempt for honest language that is the root of all evil’