I was quite able at the insignificant work I did in MI6 but absolutely dysfunctional in my domestic life. I had no experience of fatherhood. I had no example of marital bliss or the family unit.

Yes I've listened to just a few audiobooks - but hope to listen to more. I've wanted to investigate how my own books sound in this format and find the experience of listening and not reading quite fascinating.

As with real reading the ability to comprehend subtlety and complexity comes only with time and a lot of experience. If you don't adequately acquire those skills moving out into the real world of real people can actually become quite scary.

I had one relative who passed away but fortunately none others. So my sort of experience of it is quite limited thankfully.

Sure I suffered a lot. But it's not like the end of the world and it's not who I am. I lead quite a pleasant life and I'm able to divorce a perceived reality from my actual experience of life.

Yes I've been trepanned. That's quite an interesting experience especially for my brain surgeon who saw my thoughts flying around in my brain.

I've seen people with a tremendous amount of educational background in the field not turn out to be terribly good actors and I've seen people with no education in the field turn out to be people that I admire quite a bit.

My mother was a dominant force in my life. She had a very specific idea about education which was: you should know everything about everything. It was quite simple. There was no exclusivity and there really was no judgment.

I had done quite a bit of research about math education when I spoke before Congress in 2000 about the importance of women in mathematics. The session of Congress was all about raising more scholarships for girls in college. I told them I felt that it's too late by college.

Since my education I've done quite untraditional things. There are very few Etonians who went to Rada. And far fewer Etonians - certainly when I was there - went to Cambridge. I don't know whether it's the same now. Most people I knew went to Oxford because it seemed more of an easy bridge.