I'm an old member of Greenpeace. I worried intensely, as I think most of my friends did, that the world was coming apart.

When thinking about the future, it is fashionable to be pessimistic. Yet the evidence unequivocally belies such pessimism. Over the past centuries, humanity's lot has improved dramatically - in the developed world, where it is rather obvious, but also in the developing world, where life expectancy has more than doubled in the past 100 years.

I think it's great that we have organisations like Greenpeace. In a pluralistic society, we want to have people who point out all the problems that the Earth could encounter. But we need to understand that they are not presenting a full and rounded view.

The fact that we're catching more fish per person than we've ever done before doesn't mean that there are not particular places where we've managed fisheries badly.

Both Othello and Iago seem a bit cracked. If you spend 15 years being responsible for death and destruction, that sense of suppressed horror is strong.

We who were born were not witnesses to our birth: like death, it is something we are forever after trying to catch sight of.

Wole Soyinka's 'Death and the King's Horseman' is a play I go back to and I read often.

I postpone death by living, by suffering, by error, by risking, by giving, by losing.