Your favorite virtue? An appreciation for irony.

To reflect upon the event horizon is a great deal more awe-inspiring than a burning bush or a wooden statue that weeps or pees or bleeds.

There's a big difference, as I'm sure you know, it's a slightly manneristic one, between people of the '60s and people of '68. Being a soixante-huitard - it's so nice to have a French word for it - is very different from just having happened to been a baby boomer in the '60s.

It's considered acceptable in our culture to approach perfect strangers, as often or not who may be in extremis, and evangelise. I don't see why that's considered a normal thing.

I still make sure to go, at least once every year, to a country where things cannot be taken for granted, and where there is either too much law and order or too little.

I was brought up in a very naval, military, and conservative background. My father and his friends had very typical opinions of the British middle class - lower-middle class actually - after the war. My father broke into the middle class by joining the navy. I was the first member of my family ever to go to private school or even to university. So, the armed forces had been upward mobility for him.

In the ordinary moral universe, the good will do the best they can, the worst will do the worst they can, but if you want to make good people do wicked things, you’ll need religion.