"We live in troubling times for the conservative conscience. The West is adrift without leadership, anarchy is spreading through Asia and Africa, while the political process in Europe has been absorbed by the fantasy of European union. Almost everywhere in the civilised world we encounter the signs of social decay; the decline in religious observance and local customs; the rise of crime and violence; the pornocratic culture of the mass media; the desecration of love and marriage; the collapse of education, and the retreat of the individual into his private pleasure dome. These things threaten to populate the world with a new human species – cold-hearted, disloyal, promiscuous, uncultured, and godless whose sole pursuit is present pleasure, and who looks on the sufferings of fathers with indifference or delight."

From The Conservative Conscience, originally published in The Salisbury Review @SalisburyReview in 1994. "In the face of this prospect those of us who were brought up in the old dispensation might be tempted to despair and the more so when we see how many of our own generation are prepared to accept or justify the reigning trivialities, and to preach the forward-looking gospel that sees nothing to be criticised in women priests, Sir Richard Rogers, or the new Radio Three.

Cultural despair has been with us, however, for many decades, and writers who have no other message, or who seek to comfort us with fantasies of a life outside civilisation, merely illustrate what they condemn. The exasperated writings of men like Leavis and Lawrence are also exasperating. We live only once and that once is now. The choice lies before us, as it has lain before every being in history, to live well or badly, to be virtuous or vicious, to love or to hate. And this is an individual choice, which depends on cultural conditions only obliquely, and which no other person can make in our stead."

"I cannot prevent myself from feeling a certain inner revulsion whenever the word person is self-consciously summoned to take the place once occupied by man, or when the flow of a sentence is interrupted by a distracting use of he or she where he would once have been mandatory" "Far from serving to remove the 'irrelevant' reference to gender from the English language, such practices heighten that reference, and transform it from a harmless quirk of grammar to a vigilant ideological presence"