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As a financial historian, I was quite isolated in Oxford - British historians are supposed to write about kings - so the quality of intellectual life in my field is much higher at Harvard. The students work harder there.

I did get a very fine education, and not just in science. It took some pressure on the part of my elders to convince me that I really should take an interest in humanities.

I didn't even have a clear idea of why I wanted to go to Oxford - apart from the fact I had fallen in love with the architecture. It certainly wasn't out of some great sense of academic or intellectual achievement. In many ways, my education only began after I'd left university.

In school, all my teachers and my mum were super routing for me to study at Oxford. I picked music as a career choice, and this didn't sit too well with them!

I did really well at school, and I would have loved to have gone to Oxford or Cambridge. I would have read English, and I'm really interested in politics.

I got into New College, Oxford. The ethos was that you could work - or not.

For a long time I thought I should be a civil engineer. That seemed to be the only thing worth doing, and I chose the wrong subjects at A-level. I read all the sciences to start with, and then had to admit, 'This isn't what I want to do' and changed course.

I arrived from Harvard, where I had studied philosophy and the history of ideas, with a bias toward literature and formal thought.