My favourite TV show - I’m excited for series 4 of The Good Fight about to start, spin off from The Good Wife. I felt like someone in my family had died at the end of the Good Wife series 7, and I couldn’t tell anyone because it seemed pathetic. The Wire was probably the greatest telly series I ever watched, but much too sad to watch again. I loved The Bridge, but it is also too sad and scary to rewatch

My favourite place to go - I run down the tow path from Hampton Court to Kingston Bridge, and it always makes me happy

My favourite city - London. Or Oxford.

My favourite thing to do in my free time - knitting and watching action films, or cooking and listening to audio books or R4. I totally switch off, and am totally happy

My favourite athlete/sports personality - Kath Grainger, awesome oarswoman, kind, and a tall woman superhero.

My favourite actor – at the risk of revealing myself as very shallow, Sandra Bullock

My favourite author - can I have a Playwright? Shakespeare. My husband and I are working through multiple productions of every play. It’s like he was born 500 years into the future and time travelled backwards

My favourite drink - I love coffee

My favourite food - homemade popcorn, in front of the telly, with my children

My favourite place to eat -The Trout, Godstow. Location for Phillip Pullman’s La Belle Sauvage, it overlooks the river where I rowed as a half blue, and is a walk across Port Meadows away from Oxford’s dreaming spires.

I like people who -are respectful to people who may not seem very important. That includes children

I don’t like it when people  - patronise me

My favourite book - Middlemarch, George Eliot, it gets better on every reading. Any of the Earthsea books = let’s say The Farthest Shore, by Ursula Le Guin, which I read first as an adult to my children, and is profoundly true and moving

My favourite book character - Sparrowhawk in Le Guin’s Earthsea books, my favourite literary leader, along with Cromwell, in Mantell’s trilogy. George Eliot’s Gwendolen Harleth, who survives what life throws at her, and walks away whole at the end of a book not named after her. Can I have a play character? Isabella from Measure for Measure. “Did I tell this, who would believe me?” Very #MeToo

My favourite film -Some Like it Hot. Not a single dud scene, not a dud line

My favourite poem -“God’s Grandeur”, by Gerard Manley Hopkins. The last two lines are a fine example in English of the Welsh verse form Cynghanedd, a kind of syllable patterning. “Because the Holy Ghost over the bent/World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.” B…b/W..d..b..d..w..w…b..w..b..w

My favourite artist/band - Runrig maybe. I first heard their songs when I was a PGT and then PGR student at Strathclyde in Glasgow. Next time I heard them was 25 years later when my Scottish husband and I courted each other. Or Eurythmics. I love Annie Lennox’s voice

My favourite piece of music - Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto in A major. The second movement was the theme of Out of Africa, and now I think I love the 1st movement as much

My favourite art - Bridget Riley – explosions of shape and light channelled into structure and simplicity

My favourite person from history - I don’t know if it counts as history, but my College Principal, Baroness Daphne Park, was a spy in WW2, which was pretty impressive