"I think there’s a lot of coloured players in all the major teams and there are lots of coloured players who are probably the best in the Premier League. If you look at 25 or 30 years ago it was probably in a bad way – not as bad as some of the other nations on the Continent – but certainly there is always, always room for improvement."

"There is probably no point in my going into your questions now; for what I could say about your tendency to doubt or about your inability to bring your outer and inner lives into harmony or about all …"

"Of course Iranians don’t hate Israel. The regime wants you to think so. Our nations share a biblical relationship since the times of Cyrus, who helped the Jewish people in their hour of need. This is …"

"Capital punishment kills immediately, whereas lifetime imprisonment does so slowly. Which executioner is more humane? The one who kills you in a few minutes, or the one who wrests your life from you i…"

"Fiction has two uses. Firstly, it's a gateway drug to reading. The drive to know what happens next, to want to turn the page, the need to keep going, even if it's hard, because someone's in trouble an…"