"Dame Helen Mirren: I'm an Essex Girl" by Kevin Maher, in The Times"

"Even then it was the last days; how much more so now, when there must still be as much time till the end of the world as has passed since the ascension of the Lord! We do not know the end of the world…"

"It was no different with my own life, and with Gertrude's and that of many others. Fate was not kind, life was capricious and terrible, and there was no good or reason in nature. But there is good and…"

"The thing Spider hated about time machines was that people got them, thinking they could fix everything that had gone wrong in their lives. Thinking they could go back and make amends for things they …"

"In Iran, no-one can ignore the tragic record of the revolution. Over the past three decades some six million Iranians have fled their homeland. The Iran-Iraq war claimed almost a million lives on both…"