Mary Archer

"I'm not in the business of writing my story."

"Its thesis, that success for a woman is perhaps more broadly based than for a man, is absolutely true."

"I looked around and I thought, ‘there aren’t many women here’, and then I thought, and this is a very female thing to think, ‘I’m never going to keep up with this lot’, and it was one of my larger surprises when I discovered I was well up with that lot!"

"There is something fairly deeply ingrained in our culture, and there probably is a real difference in early reading ability – girls are way ahead."

"Lots of things go on in lots of marriages that are less than ideal and mostly they stay private and that’s how it really should be."

"The debt crisis, losing the house, losing the security that you need when you are the mother of two small children, making a completely new life, that was the toughest thing I have ever done."

"The second judge treated me as if I was a liar, but I don’t move easily. I stand my ground."

"A partnership is about helping your partner in time of difficulty. That is when it matters. I am just not a quitter."

"I’m tempted to quote Lady Longford on her husband, the Labour peer and prison reformer:when asked, 'Have you ever thought of divorce?’, she replied, 'Divorce never; murder, frequently’."

"Fidelity is a great quality but kindness, loyalty and resilience are also very important in bad times."

"Intimations of old age are much easier to face together. That’s not to say the marriage gets easier, but it would be very much harder growing old without each other."

"To me everything has to work round family, and fortunately it has"

"As someone whose life was saved by my own hospital, I would say if you’re really ill I would go to the NHS – I would not go to a private hospital"

"I found there was a field called photoelectrochemistry, invented by the American military in its attempts to build a solar rechargeable battery"

"The first thing I’d do would be to try to curtail population growth, because that puts a strain on so many resources as well as energy – food, land, housing. And that appears to be a question of economic development"

"Onshore wind power to me is clean and green, although some people dislike it. It’s the cheapest form of energy, so these things will take their place"

"try to avoid the boom and bust that afflicts the development of renewables. I’m not a hair-shirted environmentalist, I’m not anti-nuclear, I’m not even anti-fossil fuels – but I do believe in the reality of global warming"

"“It sounds extraordinary, but it’s a fact that balance sheets can make fascinating reading.”"

"I’ve always loved my work"

"By bringing physical and mental healthcare together for the first time and embedding research at the heart of the hospital, we will treat the whole child, not just their illness"

"It has been such a long time in the gestation… I want to live to see it open"