A young woman in her teens has about 300,000 eggs in her ovaries. By the time she is menopausal, none are left.

My father died when I was nine, but I came from a stable family environment, which I think does contribute to being well-behaved.

Robots may cut down on infection and mean a consultant can see more patients, but wouldn't you rather meet the doctor than a machine?

I used to work for the World Health Organisation in poor countries all over the world - Bangladesh, Korea, the Philippines and India. You learn a whole range of things about how other people are living and try to connect with them to gain an understanding of where they're coming from.

I don't much like being a public figure, because so often how people appear is not how they really are, and I think one of the issues about our society is that we make judgments about people on the basis of very flimsy evidence.

I don't like seeing myself on television and I don't enjoy filming. What I actually enjoy is thinking about how I am going to express something or how we are going to make the visual metaphor.

It's extraordinary to think that if you walked into a room and said you had never heard of Hamlet, you would be regarded as a Philistine. But you could walk into the same room and say, 'I don't know what a proton is,' and people would just laugh and say, 'Why should you know?'