Lawyers are always confident before the verdict. It's only after that they share their doubts.

My childhood was a happy one, spent in a tall house in South Kensington and later in East Sussex, but my early and mid teens were less successful.

We are usually undone by our lack of understanding of ourselves.

What is a week-end? Maggie Smith in Downton Abbey.

I think it's always a challenge to adapt something from one medium to another - a novel into a film or a play into a movie or whatever.

The moment I was introduced to my wife, Emma, at a party I thought, here she is - and 20 minutes later I told her she ought to marry me. She thought I was as mad as a rat. She wouldn't even give me her telephone number - and she wrote in her diary: "A funny little man asked me to marry him."

I always like to arrive at the airport early to enjoy breakfast and lounge about so that when I get on the plane all my travel fever has disappeared.