We spent some time in our family talking about what's the trade-off we want to make. We ended up talking a lot about design, but also about the values of our family. Did we care most about getting our wash done in an hour versus an hour and a half? Or did we care most about our clothes feeling really soft and lasting longer? Did we care about using a quarter of the water? We spent about two weeks talking about this every night at the dinner table.

If my kids are eating Skittles or M&Ms or something which they’re not generally allowed to eat, I’ll have to organize them by color. But I don’t think that’s absurd; I think that’s perfectly reasonable. Why would you want to eat the colors out of order?

Do keep a thesaurus, but in the shed at the back of the garden or behind the fridge, somewhere that demands travel or effort. Chances are the words that come into your head will do fine, eg “horse”, “ran”, “said”.

A few years ago, I started wearing this as a uniform of sorts. It has removed all my anxieties about clothing. I now know what I'll be wearing in both summer and winter.

The lecture that I’m proudest of [reprinted in the book as “In the Oxford Madrasa”] is the one that I gave in 2016 about conservatism being in a hopeless philosophical mess.

It was a sustained nervous breakdown really, over a long period.

The End Of The Affair by Graham Greene.

Because I loved it when I was young.

There is an awful lot of pious theatre at the moment, where you go to have what you already believed reinforced.

I stopped directing movies in the late Eighties because I believed I couldn’t be a playwright and a filmmaker.