It's time that we gave our children what we owe them, which is a richer understanding of the past and of the importance of all that Germany has done for England and that England has done for Germany.

Thrumpton Hall can be thought of as a venerable old lady, ageing gracefully. But I didn't always feel this way. Children want more than anything to be very conventional and very normal, so it was excruciating and, at times, very upsetting to grow up in a house like this.

I love writing about unknown people.

I was brought up by my father to think that the best thing in life was to be charming, to have a nice smile, always to be liked.

For those who live neither with religious consolations about death nor with a sense of death (or of anything else) as natural, death is the obscene mystery, the ultimate affront, the thing that cannot be controlled. It can only be denied.

Death should not be a taxable event.

When I got lucky enough to be successful as an actor, and I got involved in the anti-war stuff and gay rights movement, there was always this thing eating at me about the death penalty, because that was, to me, the bottom line. That was the anti-life - by definition - position, and I didn't understand why we did it.

A lot of my close friends are musicians and are consumed by the idea of death; their heads are like a torture chamber. I’m not like that - I don’t have death anxiety and I don’t think about it all the time.