We can't control whether we are rewarded for our endeavours, with cash or recognition. It is not up to us how much cash or time we get on Earth, but it is down to us how we spend it.

If there is an art of living, it is not something that can be taught timelessly. We have lessons to learn from Aristotle et al, for sure, but not if we simply uproot them from their epoch and stamp them into 21st-century soil.

Cooking can be rewarding when it is a choice and no longer the onerous duty of the housewife, and when a dishwasher can lighten the load at the other end of the process.

Looking out over the port of Dover, with the endless steam of boats coming in and out, every British citizen is reminded that belonging here has never been about blood or genes. It's simply about being at home on this discrete island and being aware of the privileges and responsibilities that brings.

The capacity to make free choices is not something we either have entirely or not at all. Rather, choices become freer the more they are the result of our own capacity to reflect on and assess facts and arguments.

Philosophy is at its most engaged when it is impure. What is being recovered from the Ancient Greek model is not some lost idea of philosophy's pure essence, but the idea that philosophy is mixed up with everything else.

Perhaps the biggest myth about cynicism is that it deepens with age. I think what really happens is that experience painfully rips away layers of scales from our eyes, and so we do indeed become more cynical about many of the things we naively accepted when younger.