This was an age before e-books. We all knew that the only way you can allow a book to survive in print in the long term is in paperback. The hardback has a certain life, and then it stops having that. It stops selling, and if you want the book to just stay around there has to be a paperback edition. So if there were not a paperback edition the book would eventually disappear from the shelves, and we would have lost the battle.

Bread and books: food for the body and food for the soul - what could be more worthy of our respect, and even love?

Both John F. Kennedy and Nelson Mandela use the same three-word phrase which in my mind says it all, which is ‘Freedom is indivisible. You can’t slice it up, otherwise it ceases to be freedom. You can dislike Charlie Hebdo … but the fact that you dislike them has nothing to do with their right to speak.

I think that England made a very big, historical mistake to allow itself to become the kind of terrorist capital of the world.

The Chinese are good at repression and can be pretty ruthless about it.

The thing that I think was very brave of my younger self was that he decided he would be an idiot. Just persevere. That feels brave to me: deciding that I'm going to damn well be this person that I've set my heart on being.

Free speech is life itself.