Sometimes I think there ought to be a coat of arms for all of us who listen to Oberst's band Bright Eyes past the age of twenty-six. 'With Love and Shame,' the motto would read. The handwriting would be the cramped and tortured scribble of a high school freshman.

One of my more hectoring voices, throughout my career, has been the one that says I ought to stop what I'm doing and make an outline.

We humans, just like the animals in our zoos, were born into bodies whose workings are both mechanistically predictable and unfathomably complex. Put in lots of sugar, and we'll get fat and sick. Confine our movement, and we'll get weak and antsy. Give us some manageable problems with which to grapple, and we'll cheer up.

There's something to be said for a likable character, but fiction has a way of upending our ordinary standards.

My life was transformed by the Labour government of 1945. It was transformative for millions of people like me, you know - education, the health service. It was proof that politics can make life better for people; that a social dream can become a social reality by the power of government.

When I went to the University, the medical school was the only place where one could hope to find the means to study life, its nature, its origins, and its ills.

Private education can give you confidence, which is marvellous; a sense of entitlement isn't.

My mom is an art teacher and is very much into the performing arts. What can I say? She is the female in my life and has guided me on how to act and conduct myself. A lot of my strength comes from her.