I've always had great respect for Paddington because he is amusingly English and eccentric. He is a great British institution and my generation grew up with the books and then Michael Horden's animations.

Christmas to a child is the first terrible proof that to travel hopefully is better than to arrive.

I am a lover of truth, a worshipper of freedom, a celebrant at the altar of language and purity and tolerance.

It's rather splendid to think of all those great men and women who appear to have presented symptoms that allow us to describe them as bipolar. Whether it's Hemingway, Van Gogh... Robert Schumann has been mentioned... Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath... some of them with rather grim ends.

Christmas to a child is the first terrible proof that to travel hopefully is better than to arrive.