I hate fussing about in the kitchen when I have people over to supper, so I make a rich beef stew cooked in wine with carrots, sundried tomato paste and chopped chorizo sausage.

My go-to winter recipe is beef and butternut squash stew, cooked in the slow oven all day.

I'm mad about gardening. I have an allotment on the other side of Hampstead Heath, and I keep three hens in my garden.

One sees more and more people who are miserable and demented and you feel it would be both kind and wise to leave them a few pills.

Cycling is the only way to free ourselves from the misery of the Tube, the wall-to-wall buses that line Oxford Street, the hopelessness of even thinking about driving.

It's a very rich brew that's in your psyche by the time you're in your 60s, and I think that's rather interesting. It makes you feel you've lived a very long life; it's like going on holiday to three different cities rather than spending two weeks in Lisbon. You look back on the holiday, and you seem to have been away forever.