Contemporary moral philosophy has found an original way of being boring, which is by not discussing moral issues at all.

People have been predicting the death of philosophy since the 17th century. When I was a student, people were saying, 'We're in the last days of philosophy.' Then we were told in the '60s it would be replaced by sociology, then by literary criticism.

Virtually the only subject in which one could ever get a scholarship to Oxford or Cambridge was classics. So I went to Oxford to study classics and, unlike Cambridge, it had a philosophy component, and I became completely transported by it.

I was interested in philosophy before I knew I was. That's to say, when I was at school, I used to argue with my friends about issues that turned out to be philosophical ones of some kind.

Reality TV is here, it's been here really since the Carol Levis Discovery Show in 1957. It's never changed. It just looks a bit different.

I grew up in Saudi Arabia and India and Cyprus, and I lived in a war-zone myself, and, I mean, I had a pretty bizarre, I guess, nomadic childhood, and so I was really drawn to international relations and political science.

If you do an experiment and it gives you what you did not expect, it is a discovery.

That certainly is one approach to take. My own is to acknowledge the inner child and try to work with my first fascination with science fiction. I have tried to build on its idea content and narrative drive rather than to discard them.