There is no such thing, incidentally, as one kudo.

My favourite fellow of the Royal Society is the Reverend Thomas Bayes, an obscure 18th-century Kent clergyman and a brilliant mathematician who devised a complex equation known as the Bayes theorem, which can be used to work out probability distributions. It had no practical application in his lifetime, but today, thanks to computers, is routinely used in the modelling of climate change, astrophysics and stock-market analysis.

It is unthinkable to have a British countryside that doesn't have actual functioning farmers riding tractors, cows in fields, things like that.

All the things that are part of your heritage make you British - that makes this country what it is. It's part of your history. And here, unlike America, it's still living history.

I'm not a natural story-teller. Put a keyboard in front of me and I'm fine, but stand me up in front of an audience and I'm actually quite shy and reserved.

I don't know whether I'm misanthropic. It seems to me I'm constantly disappointed. I'm very easily disappointed.

Roads get wider and busier and less friendly to pedestrians. And all of the development based around cars, like big sprawling shopping malls. Everything seems to be designed for the benefit of the automobile and not the benefit of the human being.