I think that when something happens when you're growing up, like a death or divorce, it does open the world slightly because things aren't as straightforward.

People keep saying how amazing it is having a female lead, and I just sort of feel, 'Well, of course!'

My agent called me up and said, 'There is a tremendous female lead in the new 'Star Wars' film, and I think you're really going to like it.' The opportunity to play someone determined, who's trying to find her skills as a leader; to be in a fantasy movie; to be able to do a leading female role in a film of that scale - that's very, very rare.

My mother was in the kind of late-'60s, early-'70s origins of female emancipation. And she was very much like, 'You're not going to be defined by how you look. It's going to be about who you are and what you do.'

Whoever it was who said that to philosophize is an exercise in dying was right in more ways than one, for by writing a book, nobody gets younger.

Land and sea, weakness and decline are great separators, but death is the great divorcer for ever.

Since the shock of former United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan's death, I have been reflecting on what made him so special. To my mind, it is simply this: Kofi Annan was both one of a kind and one of us.

You haven't lost anything when you know were it is. Death can hide but not divide.