I would like to do something modern and possibly funny.

In a funny way poems are suited to modern life. They're short they're intense. Nobody has time to read a 700-page book. People read magazines and a poem takes less time than an article.

The challenge as we saw in the Nigerian project was to restructure the economy decisively in the direction of a modern free market as an appropriate environment for cultivation of freedom and democracy and the natural emergence of a new social order.

None of us had any idea of how successful Downton was going to be. I thought I was signing up for another period drama that had a slightly modern feel. It had a freedom about it because it was coming out of the head of Julian Fellowes. Anything could happen and generally did.

Modernism released us from the constraints of everything that had gone before with a euphoric sense of freedom.

It is capitalist America that produced the modern independent woman. Never in history have women had more freedom of choice in regard to dress behavior career and sexual orientation.

You have to know the classics if you want to cook modern food.

It was my Uncle George who discovered that alcohol was a food well in advance of modern medical thought.

I wouldn't say that processed food ready meals and even takeaways aren't relevant to modern life it's just that over the past 40 years there are three generations of people who have come out of school and gone through their home life without ever being shown how to cook properly.

The reserve of modern assertions is sometimes pushed to extremes in which the fear of being contradicted leads the writer to strip himself of almost all sense and meaning.