“... Dylan – containing folk music of rapidly evolving subtlety and bite, plus protest songs like ‘Masters of War’, ‘Only a Pawn in Their Game’ and ‘A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall’. I was too young, and too much of a chart-watching pop-picker, to pay much attention to these, though I attended to them greedily in retrospect. Listening back to them now I ...”

“... was open to discussions on the hunger strikers’ demands if they would stop their fast. Their IRA masters would not let them do that, but they did start talking about terms for ending the protest. The talks broke down, but they had the effect of raising expectations among the families of the remaining hunger strikers that their lives might be spared. This ...”

“... Two days filming my TV parables programme Heavenly Stories at Dulwich College, the setting the Masters’ Library, a galleried, High Victorian room adjoining the school hall, presumably where the masters foregather before assembly. Over the chimneypiece are two crude allegorical panels of Piety and Liberality, the ideals ...”

“... the eastern oil town of Santa Cruz de la Sierra. (Granada Television had enlisted me to act as Brian Moser’s consultant on a World in Action documentary.) At La Esperanza, we found the commander, Major Ralph ‘Pappy’ Shelton, a Korean veteran, in an expansive mood. With a handful of senior American officers he was celebrating the end of the six-month ...”

“... lives and property by ill-disciplined soldiers in a distant land, but to many Mexicans, as Brian DeLay has recently shown, the US army promised protection from great bands of Comanche raiders against whom the Mexican government had failed to protect them for decades. The war itself was bloodier and more frustrating than the United States expected but ...”

“... who would now be seen a natural performer for the television age, Patrick Moore channelled by Brian Blessed, sinks a shaft in Sussex, going deeper than anyone has gone before, to prove that ‘the world upon which we live is itself a living organism, endowed … with a circulation, a respiration, and a nervous system of its own.’ Challenger’s dig ...”