I checked to see if there'd been a really good book published in the last few decades. Then I started with what Cleopatra would have read, asking myself, 'What can we know about her education?' It turns out to be a very great deal, and bizarrely, no one had written about that before.
Cleopatra had one great advantage. She lived at a time when female sovereigns were not anomalies. And when women enjoyed rights they would not again enjoy for another 2,000 years. You could call them early feminists, if I may use a dirty word.
We don't know how Cleopatra spent her days, but we do know how other Hellenistic monarchs spent their days. There has been a great amount of scholarship in the last 30 years about education in the Hellenistic world and women in the Hellenistic world. We now know how an upper-class woman was educated in her day.
I was born into the Church of England but in the most nominal way possible you can imagine, so it's Christmas and Easter. And then like a great many clergy in the Church of England I actually got nobbled by being a chorister.
There's a great deal of suspicion and misunderstanding about IT among practicing doctors. One hears things like, 'I don't want to be turned into a data entry clerk, and I don't want some machine between me and my patients.'
I remember singing around the house to records that were playing. All kinds of music. And the great James Cleveland was often in our house, and I grew up with his sound as well.
I seriously love Cleveland. It's a great city.
My idea of good company is the company of clever, well-informed people who have a great deal of conversation; that is what I call good company.
It is a great act of cleverness to be able to conceal one's being clever.
The great Chinese classics have always said that it's better not to fight; that the clever man achieves his ends without violence; that a battle delayed is better than a battle fought.
When I was 16, I played Macbeth at school and my English teacher said, 'I think you may have acting talent. Try to get into the National Youth Theatre of Great Britain and see where you get.' I wouldn't have thought of that at all. I wanted to be a surgeon, but I wasn't a clever man.
The great gift of conversation lies less in displaying it ourselves than in drawing it out of others. He who leaves your company pleased with himself and his own cleverness is perfectly well pleased with you.
The great thing about Twitter is, you get a lot back, and I read through a lot, and I want my fans to know that I do read a lot, and it's why I do respond or retweet clever posts, and I'm constantly amazed by the cleverness of people on Twitter.
Creative output, you know, is just pain. I'm going to be cliche for a minute and say that great art comes from pain.
In my time since moving to the United States, I've found that there is a dearth of great writing for black people. There are stories that depict us in a way that isn't cliched or niche, and that a white person, a Chinese person, an Indian person can watch and relate to. Those are the stories I want to be a part of telling.
At the time, when you're being dissected and judged it's pretty brutal, but in hindsight it's great and - it sounds cliched - you do come out the other side better and stronger.
One of the great cliches of campaign journalism is the notion that American elections have long since ceased to be about issues and ideas.
Everything really came together on ‘1992.' That isn't to dismiss my earlier works - they were great - but when I focused myself on hip-hop everything just clicked.
'Cheers' was great. They paired me up with Shelley Long on this tiny bar set for the final audition. That was my first really big one, and we just clicked instantly - I still think I got the part because of Shelley.
I look at directing as a sporting event. It's a race, a marathon. It's great when it clicks, which is why I push my crews so hard so we can excel.
