But to return to my new companion. I was greatly delighted with him, and made it my business to teach him everything that was proper to make him useful, handy, and helpful; but especially to make him speak, and understand me when I spoke; and he was the aptest scholar there ever was.

I come from a world labouring under the burden of debts whose paying back exposes it to starvation or very close to it. Some of its people perish in Asia from floods, others do so in Africa from famine. In South Africa millions have been undone with rejection and with deprivation of all human rights in the age of human rights, as though they were not counted among humans.

All I need to make a comedy is a park, a policeman and a pretty girl.

What we need is to take a step back and say 'why is it we as a country have a problem with children's nutrition and obesity?' These are things we can all solve rather than suggesting that teachers solve them for us.

The challenge will be for us to resist those pressures and make it clear that the most important thing schools can do is to give children the skills, knowledge, confidence and qualifications to make independent and autonomous decisions for themselves. To be authors of their own life story.

We want to remove from teachers the fear factor of ending up in court or some disciplinary procedure if they intervene.

The key thing is to give a child a great start in life [...] The ideal, of course, is to place an adopted child with a family whose circumstances and background match its own, but in the search for that match it is often black and Asian children who suffer. The longer they are in care, the more difficulties occur.

I don't know much about my birth parents but there were significant differences between their backgrounds and those of my adoptive parents. It made no difference to me.

Our generation are the new old. I remember what someone of 60 looked like when I was a kid. They didn't look like me.

With women, it's dog years when you are 40. It's as if you are a thousand years old. It's over.