On account of its scale and complexity, the world will always outstrip the capacity of any single body to ask fertile questions of it.

Pegging your contentment to the overall state of the world rather than of your own life: the basis of morality, or a sort of madness?

I see religion as a storehouse of lots of really good ideas that a secular world should look at, raid, and learn from.

The humanities have been forced to disguise, both from themselves and their students, why their subjects really matter, for the sake of attracting money and prestige in a world obsessed by the achievements of science.

Parents become very good at not hearing the explicit words and listening instead to what the child means but doesn't yet know how to say: 'I'm lonely, in pain, frightened' - distress which then unfairly comes out as an attack on the safest, kindest, most reliable thing in the child's world: the parent.

I was foreign and Jewish, with a funny name, and was very small and hated sport, a real problem at an English prep school. So the way to get round it was to become the school joker, which I did quite effectively - I was always fooling around to make the people who would otherwise dump me in the loo laugh.