'I used to have a golden Rolls Royce...'

I’ve signed thousands of copies of my textbooks. I’m always very pleased to do it. If students invest in me it’s the least I can do. It’s humbling to be influencing the next generation of chemistry undergraduates, and I very much like to see the pleasure that meeting me gives to students – after all, I wouldn’t have written my textbook without the feedback I’ve had from my own students.

It’s true I used to have a golden Rolls Royce. But I sold it on eBay. I used it for sitting in most of the time – it was an extravagance, and fun, but enormously expensive in the end.

I listen to music a great deal. It’s only classical music and jazz – not all jazz, I don’t like experimental jazz. I like comfortable jazz basically, at the easy end of the jazz scale. And anything classical – I have music on most of the day. My favourite composers are the standard crew, really. Bach and Mozart. I also like art. I do all the art myself in my textbooks, so I’m alert to artistic trends. I only like modern art – I don’t like dead men hanging on crosses, if I were to collect anything I would collect modern art, modern art from the 20th Century onwards.