I did know Ted Hughes and I partly wrote the book to explain to myself and others the complexities of a marriage that was for six years wonderfully productive of poetry and then ended in tragedy.

I was very influenced by the musicals and romantic comedies of the 1930s. I admired Gene Harlow and such which probably explains why since the end of my marriage I've dated nothing but a succession of blondes.

How do you explain the bond between man and wife? Well for one thing it's private. What people do in their own marriage is their own business.

Another argument vaguer and even less persuasive is that gay marriage somehow does harm to heterosexual marriage. I have yet to meet anyone who can explain to me what this means. In what way would allowing same-sex partners to marry diminish the marriages of heterosexual couples?

Love is an endless mystery for it has nothing else to explain it.

Miracles in the sense of phenomena we cannot explain surround us on every hand: life itself is the miracle of miracles.

When we remember we are all mad the mysteries disappear and life stands explained.

Perhaps to the uninformed it may appear unaccountable that a man should be able to retain in his memory such a variety of learning but the close alliance with each other of the different branches of science will explain the difficulty.

To remove this obstacle I repeat or refer to such knowledge as has come under my notice my own previously expressed views and also describe and exhibit my last experiments and explain their novelty and utility.

Agricultural practice served Darwin as the material basis for the elaboration of his theory of Evolution which explained the natural causation of the adaptation we see in the structure of the organic world. That was a great advance in the knowledge of living nature.