The word 'funny' is a bit like the word 'love' - we don't have enough words to describe the many varieties.

My father described this tall lady who stands in the middle of the New York harbor holding high a torch to welcome people seeking freedom in America. I instantly fell in love.

All my life Americans have been accustomed to thinking of theirs as 'the richest freest' country in the world. By most measurements it was long a contender for that honor and - among the larger countries if equal weight were given to wealth and indices of freedom - probably did deserve to be so described.

What Churchill described as the twin marauders of war and tyranny have been almost entirely banished from our continent. Today hundreds of millions dwell in freedom from the Baltic to the Adriatic from the Western Approaches to the Aegean.

From the described experiment it is clear that the mere act of eating the food even not reaching the stomach determines the stimulation of the gastric glands.

Part of my job as a food writer is to describe food. So my work on 'Top Chef ' I feel is an extension of that. When we give a criticism to the contestant we want to make sure we tell them why it's not working and why it would work if they did it a different way.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights describes the family as the natural and fundamental unit of society. It follows that any choice and decision with regard to the size of the family must irrevocably rest with the family itself and cannot be made by anyone else.

Happy or unhappy families are all mysterious. We have only to imagine how differently we would be described - and will be after our deaths - by each of the family members who believe they know us.

I don't think it's any coincidence that I lost my religious faith and 'manned up' in the same year. I was described somewhere as a lapsed Catholic which is funny because I'm not going back! I want to achieve things rather than live life in an animalistic way.

I have never described the time I was in Doctor Who as anything except a kind of ecstatic success but all the rest has been rather a muddle and a disappointment. Compared to Doctor Who it has been an outrageous failure really - it's so boring.