“Thirty years ago [written 2009], over-regulation, over-taxation, mis-regulation, statism, state corporatism, and economic folly, cosiness and regulatory capture, and a crescent ideological enemy without, who were assisted by enemies – both fifth columnists and useful fools – within, had led to a crisis of confidence in the West, and in all lands that – and amongst all peoples, particularly those who were oppressed in their own lands, who – loved and desired liberty. Of course, thirty years ago, Britain had Margaret Thatcher to turn to.”

“Sixty-five years ago [written 2009], in a brief lull between storms in a remarkably stormy June, even by the standards of Channel weather, the heirs of Harold and the kinsmen of the Conqueror came to Normandy. They were supported by the remnants of their first, North American, empire, the two great nations that they had planted in the New World in the time of Good Queen Bess and James 6th and 1st: the Americans, who had rebelled in the name of the rights of Englishmen, and the Canadians, who had stood loyal in the name of the Crown. … The honours of these regiments are ancient and moving: Minden and Malplaquet, Mysore, Badajoz, Waterloo, Inkerman, Gallipoli, the Somme, Imjin. None shines more brightly than Normandy 1944. The paths of glory may lead but to the grave; yet all, even golden boys and girls, must come to dust. It is a better path to the grave than any of the others, not because glory is something to seek, but because, not once or twice in our long island story, the way of duty has been the path to glory; and duty is to be done. …Let us now praise famous men, and our fathers that begat us.”

“We live, all of us, in sprung rhythm. Even in cities, folk stir without knowing it to the surge in the blood that is the surge and urgency of season. In being born, we have taken seisin of the natural world, and as ever, it is the land which owns us, not we, the land. Even in the countryside, we dwell suspended between the rhythms of earth and season, weather and sky, and those imposed by metropolitan clocks, at home and abroad.When does the year begin? No; ask rather, When does it not? For us – all of us – as much as for Mr Eliot, midwinter spring is its own season; for all of us, if we but see it, our world is as full of time-coulisses as was Thomas Mann’s.Countrymen know this, with the instinct they share with their beasts. Writers want to know it also, and to articulate what the countryman knows and cannot, perhaps, express to those who sense but do not know, immured in sad conurbations, rootless amidst Betjeman’s frightful vision of soot and stone, worker’s flats and communal canteens, where it is the boast of pride that a man doesn’t let the grass grow under his feet.As both countryman and writer, I have a curious relationship to time.”

“There are two primary strains in the Conservative Party: grocers, and grandees. … By ‘grandees’ and ‘grocers’, I am not referring to social class or any of that; nor do I refer to the Worshipful Company of Grocers, all cloves and camels. I refer rather to two fundamental positions within the Conservative Party, regardless of one’s antecedents. … A grandee Conservative sees the country as a village: a village of which he and his party, when in government, act the Squire. As the Squire, the grandee moves jovially amongst his tenants in their tied cottages, dispensing largesse and reproof…. There are two problems with this model. The first is that HMG is not the Squire and the subjects of the Crown are not the smocked tenantry of the government of the day. The second is that these principles – or instincts, as one can hardly call them principles – however different they may be to the fiercely held maxims of Labour old and new, lead in the end to the same statist solutions as those the Left proposes, and to accepting and ‘managing’ statism when a Conservative government succeeds a Labour one. It is the grocers who will always and rightly attempt to roll back the State and its reach in favour of liberty.”

“At all times and in all places, in season and out of season, time is now and England, place is now and England; past and present inter-penetrate. The best days an angler spends upon his river – the river which is Heraclitus’ river, which is never the same as the angler is never the same, yet is the same always – are those he recollects in tranquillity, as wintry weather lashes the land without, and he, snug and warm, ties new patterns of dry-fly, and remembers the leaf-dapple upon clear water and the play of light and the eternal dance of ranunculus in the chalk-stream. A cricket match between two riotously inexpert village Second XIs is no less an instance of timeless, of time caught in ritual within an emerald Arcadia, than is a Test at Lord’s, and we who love the greatest of games know that we do indeed catch a fleeting glimpse of a spectral twelfth man on every pitch, for in each re-enactment of the mystery there is the cumulation of all that has gone before and shall come after. Et ego in Arcadia.”

“When does the year begin? Well: that rather depends: on who you are, and where. The Church kalendar – like the academic, which is hewn of the ecclesiastical – begins after the harvest-tide, with Advent, a time of preparation, light kindling and shining forth even as darkness gathers. The countryman’s calendar is governed by the rhythms of the earth, of sowing and of harvest. The angler’s year, the shooting man’s, the hunter’s, all these are in the disposition of God – or Nature, if you fancy yourself allergic to God – even as is the countryman’s.”

“Note, please, that I condemn only junk science (as does Mr Delingpole): this is in fact a measure of my, and his, regard for good science. Junk bonds do not, by their existence, condemn the existence of markets; crony capitalism – which is indissolubly tied to the ‘Green’ movement and its loudest advocates, who are bought and paid for by cronyism – does not condemn capitalism; junk science does not invalidate science as a discipline. Indeed, the greatest and most implacable enemies of junk bonds are and by rights ought to be traders; of crony capitalism, capitalists; and of junk science, those who hold true science in its just regard.”