If you could edit your past, what would you change?

The peace of the Sabbath, of a stopped world, a time outside time, was palpable, infused everything, and I found myself drenched with a wistfulness, something akin to nostalgia, wondering what if: What if A and B and C had been different? What sort of person might I have been? What sort of a life might I have lived?

I wish I sent one more helicopter to get the hostages and we would have rescued then and I - I would have been re-elected, but that may have - and that may have interfered with the foundation of the Carter Center. And if I had to choose between four more years and the Carter Center, I think I would choose the Carter Center.

I wouldn’t have done the naked centrefold in Cosmopolitan magazine in 1972.

The death of my wife: I’d happily have gone first.

I would have behaved better to my first wife, and the girl I lived with afterwards. I was always away.

Since hostile people still call me a former Playboy Bunny, even at 82, I probably shouldn’t have done that in my youth, even to write an exposé. And since a couple of times they’ve also referred to me as a former CIA agent, because I went to two Soviet-era communist youth festivals, I probably shouldn’t have done that, either. Yet if I hadn’t done both, I might have judged other people by such empty symbols, too.

I would definitely change the way one or two relationships ended.

The years between 13 and 17, which I think are very formative, and the rather arid public school upbringing I had at Harrow.

I would be richer, I’d have beaten Mrs Thatcher’s ban on women in the cabinet, and I would be a dame.

All the hanging about.

To have grown up with my siblings. They were at least 10 years older than me.

Not applying myself enough at school.

I was probably too cheeky to chairmen over the years.

Nothing, really, because it was all interesting.

I would have come out earlier.

Boarding school. It was horrible.

I sometimes wish I had had the courage to be a politician – but I made the decision to be a human rights defender instead. I realised I cannot be both at the same time, because they may be incompatible.

My surname. You have no idea how many versions I’ve read and heard. It was especially irritating during my Abba years. You can imagine someone calling our hotel and saying: “I’d like to speak to one of the guys in Abba.” Who do you think the receptionist called, Andersson or Ulvaeus?

Not getting older at each birthday, but I appreciate it beats the alternative.

I should have known that I might not like what my brain scan showed, just as I should have known that the symptoms of prostatism that were increasingly bothering me were just as likely to be caused by cancer as by the benign prostatic enlargement that happens in most men as they age. But I continued to think that illness happened to patients and not to doctors, even though I was now retired. Twenty months after I had my brain scanned, I was diagnosed with advanced prostate cancer. I had had typical symptoms for years, steadily getting worse, but it took me a long time before I could bring myself to ask for help. I thought I was being stoical when in reality I was being a coward. I simply couldn’t believe the diagnosis at first, so deeply ingrained was my denial.