I've been led by my nose all my life and tried to make perfume by boiling sugar water in jam jars and stuffing them full of gardenia and rose petals when I was growing up in Swaziland.

Lena Dunham is an extraordinary woman.

Smell is the shortest synaptic leap in the brain to our memory, and I'm amazed that people don't sniff everything.

Everything I dared dream of has come to fruition. Which is not to say that I don't grumble with the best of them, but the wobbles have been way outweighed by the wonders.

In one sense, the Internet is like the discovery of the printing press, only it's very different. The printing press gave us access to recorded knowledge. The Internet gives us access, not just to knowledge, but to the intelligence contained in people's crania, access to the intelligence of people on a global basis.

Although attracted by the humanities, I had chosen medicine as a career, seduced by the image of the 'man in white' dispensing care and solace to the suffering. But science was lurking around the corner, in the form of an unpaid student assistantship in the laboratory of physiology.

I have always argued that newspapers should not have any civic purpose beyond telling readers what is happening... A reporter who doesn't quickly tell readers what they most want to know - the score - won't last long. Better he should teach political science.

If I say I am not a politician, it is because I did not go to school to do political science. But at the end of the day, I think we are all born politicians. It's practical. All you gotta do is practice.