Ever since adolescence, [my elder sister Anna] has been an enthusiastic admirer of the great Swedish writer, the Nobel Laureate Selma Lagerlöf, and she infected me so much with her enthusiasm that I decided to become a writer and describe Italian saga "à la Lagerlöf". But things were to take a different turn.

I read Stephen Pinker's The Better Angels of Our Nature a few years ago and got to talk to him about it after, which was a lot of fun. I reviewed it for my blog, Gates Notes, because I wanted other people to read it, love it, and hopefully learn from it the way I did. It's probably my favorite book and the one I recommend most often.

It was not long after Kenneth Arrow's path-breaking study of social choice, Social Choice and Individual Values, was published in New York in 1951, that my brilliant co-student Sukhamoy Chakravarty drew my attention to the book and to Arrow's stunning "impossibility theorem" (this must have been in the early months of 1952). Sukhamoy too was broadly attracted by the left, but also worried about political authoritarianism, and we discussed the implications of Arrow's demonstration that no non-dictatorial social choice mechanism may yield consistent social decisions.

Other than the Oh the Places You'll Go which seems to be a you-must-give-it-to-all-college grads, and How to Cook Everything, which I love giving to people moving out on their own the first time, I think I've probably gifted Geek Love more than anything else.

People need justice.

As an adolescent, I read Raymond Williams, George Orwell and Simone de Beauvoir – a crash course in human decency.

Because I loved it when I was young.

Every morning, Monday to Friday, I get up at 7am and make my wife breakfast in bed.

I wrote a play called Knuckle in 1974, which opened to hostile reviews during the three-day week.

If not, I’ll go to the cinema or answer emails.