The fact is, I loved being English. I was very happy to be turned into an English schoolboy.

I went to an English school and was brought up in English. So I don't feel Czech.

I'm good at being funny.

Even when the writing seems very frivolous, I'm puritanical. I don't mean my subject matter. It's that I'm almost pathologically incapable of leaving something when I'm not quite happy with it.

The idea of the state is, or should be, a very limited, prescribed idea. The state looks after the defense of the realm, and other matters - raising revenue to pay for things which are for all of us, and so on. That idea has turned turtle now. The state isn't any longer perceived as an institution which exists to serve us.

The idea that being human and having rights are equivalent - that rights are inherent - is unintelligible in a Darwinian world.