Lord Chamberlain's readers or controllers, which were a handful of people working directly to him, were a very assorted group of people and some of them tried very hard to be as liberal as they could.

Towards the end of the Lord Chamberlain's era, when his hold was being loosened, private prosecutions began to happen. A member of staff at the Royal Court ordered to stop the play, and the police were brought in.

When you're writing about people that are not very well off, you seem to see the kitchen sink. So it was a bit of a sort of cosy phrase that got used a bit too much.

The classical writers... playwrights, Jacobean, Elizabethan playwrights, all showed areas of all classes and how they live and painted them pretty authentically.

I don't care when people think I'm an antisocial, controlling bookworm because that's what I am. It's when they interpret me wrong that I have a problem.

I always thought there were some people who were just destined to be disengaged in their jobs because that was their personality, and no matter how hard managers tried, there wasn't much they could do with some of those people.