Toby Stephens

I've learnt an enormous amount from my children. Mostly that my agenda isn't the most important thing in the world. For a while, I was trying to squeeze them into my life. And it was such torment! It makes you realise how selfish you are.

Places like the National Theatre or Sheffield, these great engines of theatre, make us cutting edge because they can be experimental. They can do plays that nobody else can afford to do in ways nobody else can afford to do.

To play a lawyer and have one year of law school under your belt, you sort of know what you're talking about! I'm able to memorize the legal courtroom stuff a lot faster than I would have been able to otherwise.

John Quincy Adams ranks with Jimmy Carter on the roster of ex-presidential redemption. Instead of completing a biography of his father, he let himself be elected to the House, where he spent nine terms in Whiggish opposition to the Democrats, supporting a national bank and a protective tariff and internal improvements.