When I left Europe in 1987 I did so with the thought that my relevance as a composition teacher would benefit from a certain cool distance to certain tendencies I had been observing for several years with increasing disquiet.

Measured in time of transport and communication the whole round globe is now smaller than a small European country was a hundred years ago.

Europe is dying. That is one of the unsayable truths of our time. We are undergoing the moral equivalent of climate change and no one is talking about it.

People feel that the EU is a one-way process a great machine that sucks up decision-making from national parliaments to the European level until everything is decided by the EU. That needs to change.

The biggest danger to the European Union comes not from those who advocate change but from those who denounce new thinking as heresy. In its long history Europe has experience of heretics who turned out to have a point.

We have the character of an island nation: independent forthright passionate in defence of our sovereignty. We can no more change this British sensibility than we can drain the English Channel. And because of this sensibility we come to the European Union with a frame of mind that is more practical than emotional.

I just completed a tour in Europe. I played every night. This requires traveling some days for six hours in a van or a train or a car. After six weeks of that I checked into the hotel and just fell apart.

This film business perhaps more so in America than in Europe has always been about young sexuality. It's not true of theatre but in America film audiences are young. It's not an intellectual cinema in America.

The sad truth is that without complex business partnerships between African elites and European traders and commercial agents the slave trade to the New World would have been impossible at least on the scale it occurred.

It is easier for women to succeed in business the arts and politics in America than in Europe.