Mary Warnock, Baroness Warnock

"I knew of myself, from the age of about fifteen, that I was a natural Tory. All my instincts and all my loves were Trollopian. I loved the thought of a landed aristocracy, though I would never be a member of one (I did not, even in my fantasies, believe that I should marry a duke). I loved hunting; I loved time-honoured hierarchies; I loved cathedrals. I wanted to become an old-fashioned scholar. Above all, perhaps, I loved the idea of accumulating, inheriting and passing on wealth to my family. Nothing could be further from the politics of the Left. Yet increasingly during the war I felt that to indulge my instincts was wrong. I must pull myself together, recognise the unfairness of my privileged and comfortable way of life, begin properly to aim for a classless society, think about politics, become someone who would go to what I vaguely thought of as Meetings. By 1945, I had talked myself pretty thoroughly round to the Left."

"Oxford is, and always has been, full of cliques, full of factions, and full of a particular non-social snobbiness."