Most importantly nothing has happened to change my conviction that freedom and the love of liberty remain the essential defining attributes of our national character as a people.

I take life as it happens. And I give myself a lot of freedom.

That happens every time I get behind a guitar regardless of what I'm saying 'cause music is freedom and being free is the closest I've ever felt to being spiritual.

With Napster and the sharing of music of course there are going to be people who exploit it. Greed has no end. But there's a lot of good that could happen. We shouldn't let the economic concerns of the major labels infringe on our freedom to share music.

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.

The nice thing about the Bible is it doesn't give you too many facts. Two an a half lines and it tells you the whole story and that leaves you a great deal of freedom to elaborate on how it might have happened.

Certain things happened in the early church. Women who had never had any freedom suddenly have the ability to stand up and speak and be treated as equals within the life of the church.

Today hundreds of millions dwell in freedom from the Baltic to the Adriatic from the Western Approaches to the Aegean. And while we must never take this for granted the first purpose of the European Union - to secure peace - has been achieved and we should pay tribute to all those in the EU alongside Nato who made that happen.

That freedom can never be attained by a nation without suffering and sacrifice has been amply borne out by the recent tragic happenings in this subcontinent.

Back a hundred years ago especially around Woodrow Wilson what happened in this country is we took freedom and we chopped it into pieces.