Like most citizens of popular and international urban centres I don't take advantage of the cultural opportunities. Perhaps this comes from growing up in suburbia. Home is where you eat sleep read watch television and ignore your parents. It is not where you go to the ballet and then attend a heated panel discussion about it afterwards.

It is in Rousseau's writing above all that history begins to turn from upper-class honour to middle-class humanitarianism. Pity sympathy and compassion lie at the centre of his moral vision. Values associated with the feminine begin to infiltrate social existence as a whole rather than being confined to the domestic sphere.

God had brought me to my knees and made me acknowledge my own nothingness and out of that knowledge I had been reborn. I was no longer the centre of my life and therefore I could see God in everything.

Our strength in finance has led us to set up an international financial centre with medium and long-term objectives especially to develop Islamic financial and insurance services.

I think that New York is not the cultural centre of America but the business and administrative centre of American culture.

My view is that you still in order to win from the Labour perspective have to have a strong alliance with business as well as the unions. You have got to be very much in the centre ground on things like public sector reform.