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“... We are all guilty of existence and our sheer numbers make us enemies of the good green earth. Ben Elton dabbled in these waters in Stark, and, despite the jokes, there is no reason to believe that he or Hiaasen think humans are capable of much enlightened self-interest. So, while there are plenty of human deaths and maimings in Hiaasen’s ...”

“... right. The plot sometimes creaks, though no more loudly than John Spurling’s The Ragged End or Ben Elton’s eco-farce Stark. These books try for the global range and include by reference and implication huge volumes of contemporary history. Stories which bring in two world wars or the coming eco-crisis or the sunset of Empire must break unities of ...”

“... our stupidity to the comic formula, the more we have to laugh!’ And as Rowan Atkinson and Ben Elton gear up to present a special version of Blackadder as the centrepiece (apparently) of the treats on offer in the Millennium Dome, we must face up to the fact that no one seems to be more important to a nation than its most famous and beloved ...”

“... established a warm friendship with a Jewish classmate, Siegfried Sommer (the great-grandfather of Ben Elton), and initially responded well to his new surroundings. Soon, however, Wilhelm found the tough academic regime irksome. Teachers noted his tendency to digress from the subject at hand, and Hinzpeter – who continued to give him private instruction ...”

“... Edmondson on The Young Ones ranted about The Good Life, Felicity Kendal and twee British sitcoms. Ben Elton peppered his routines with diatribes about ‘Mrs Thatch’, and Spitting Image combined strident ad hominem attacks on current politicians with grotesque and unforgiving latex puppetry. All to no avail (or, as the Two Ronnies might have put it in ...”

“... of the relationship that they enjoyed with a popular audience – the element that a fan like Ben Elton has perhaps injected into his work with Richard Curtis, and which makes a series like Blackadder, with its own celebrated double act, so appealing. For McCann this professional warmth is based on a mastery of technique honed through constant ...”

“... beyond the age of 14. On my way to lecture on him in Cambridge once, I left my bike for repair at Ben Hayward’s cycle shop, happening to mention that Henry was on the menu that morning. ‘I know – great big fat bloke.’ Not conspicuously obese but with shoulders two feet too wide, an anatomical impossibility, he looms above me in Hans Eworth’s version ...”

“... This is the second collection of essays by Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie to appear in English. The first was called The Territory of the Historian and up to a point justified its title by describing a landscape of historical investigation – rural France peopled by a peasantry engaged in earning a living and undergoing birth, disease and death, the whole benignly directed by techniques of quantification ...”

“... best-kept guinea pig’ and criticised ‘her infatuation with crappy ideas’. ‘When Elton tells us that it seemed to him that she lived her life like a candle in the wind, what churl will point out that it seemed to him she lived her life more like a bloody great chandelier surrounded by flunkies and screens?’ he asked. What churl ...”