When I was twelve I was obsessed. Everything was sex. Latin was sex. The dictionary fell open at 'meretrix', a harlot. You could feel the mystery coming off the word like musk. 'Meretrix'! This was none of your mensa-a-table, this was a flash from a forbidden planet, and it was everywhere. History was sex, French was sex, art was sex, the Bible, poetry, penfriends, games, music, everything was sex except biology which was obviously sex but not really sex, not the one which was secret and ecstatic and wicked and a sacrament and all the things it was supposed to be but couldn't be at one and the same time - I got that in the boiler room and it turned out to be biology after all.

"I fairly often find I'm with people who forget I don't quite belong in the world we're in" he says. In 2008 Stoppard was voted the number 76 on the Time 100 Time magazine's list of the most influential people in the world. " He acknowledges that he started off "as a language nerd" primarily enjoying linguistic and ideological playfulness feeling early in his career that journalism was far better suited for presaging political change than playwriting.

Sir Tom Stoppard OM CBE FRSL (born Tomáš Straussler; 3 July 1937) is a Czech-born British playwright knighted in 1997. Themes of human rights censorship and political freedom pervade his work along with exploration of linguistics and philosophy. He co-wrote the screenplays for Brazil and Shakespeare in Love and has received one Academy Award and four Tony Awards.