Simon Russell Beale is an incomparable speaker of Shakespeare and a superb all-round actor.

I fell in love with Shakespeare when I was 12, and I read the whole works. Yes, I was precocious.

I belong to the Richmond Concert Society, who put on very good concerts.

When dealing with a subject who is dead, you have this feeling of being God. You know who they're going to marry, when they're going to die. It's strange to feel so omniscient.

In 2007, several musicologists contacted me at about the same time, expressing interest in the work of the mysterious Muriel Herbert, a few of whose songs they had come across.

One of my most vivid memories of the mid-1950s is of crying into a washbasin full of soapy grey baby clothes - there were no washing machines - while my handsome and adored husband was off playing football in the park on Sunday morning with all the delightful young men who had been friends to both of us at Cambridge three years earlier.