My first hero, as a teenager, was James Connolly. I remember discovering that he was a feminist, and that was an eye-opener, coming from a man of such poverty.

The difficulty for the Government is there's this ideological straitjacket of the market will provide, let the market rip and everything will work out... It's back to trickle-down economics, which, it's plain to see, have not delivered.

My impression is that most women public service workers have a long fuse. Precisely because they care so deeply about services, more than anyone, they still want to find a sensible and fair negotiated agreement. But their patience has run out.

The backwoodsmen are muttering about making Britain's draconian union laws - already among the toughest in Europe - harsher still. And parts of the media will continue to attack public service pensions, as if school meals staff, refuse collectors and healthcare workers have no right to a decent retirement.

There are recurring elements in popularized fairy tales, such as absent parents, some sort of struggle, a transformation, and a marriage. If you look at a range of stories, you find many stories about marriage, sexual initiation, abandonment. The plots often revolve around what to me seem to be elemental fears and desires.

A banker who is allowed to borrow money at X and loan it out at X plus Y will just go crazy and do too much of it if the civilization doesn't have rules that prevent it.

There is such a desire to give everybody a piece, we're probably wasting a great deal of homeland security money trying to be politically correct, when we really need to make sure that our cities get the money they need.

You study all your life, you work really hard to do your best work onstage and onscreen, and then you make your best money playing an ant.