Verbally, I'm quite fast on my feet. I could embarrass or anger most people if I wanted to.

The business of funding digging journalists is important to encourage. It cannot be replaced by bloggers who don't have access to politicians, who don't have easy access to official documents, who aren't able to buttonhole people in power.

Clearly the human story is one of acceleration. There has been a Moore curve in terms of the number of people alive on the planet, our technological ability, and our ability to understand ourselves. We have had this extraordinary, explosive growth in our ingenuity.

I'm a great believer in the direct quote in quotation marks and the hard fact.

This has been an extremely uncomfortable week for Mr Blair.

It [the Enlightenment] is clearly the foundation of the modern world. Almost everything we are arguing about at the moment - whether it's the religious hatred law and free speech, immigration, the movement of peoples, goods and services and what that does to national identity, or the proper limits of the state - go back to the positions first set out in the Enlightenment.