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“... Ifirst met​ Jonathan’s knees. This was because Cambridge sofas in the 1950s had broken springs. Once they had buoyed up culture heroes like Rupert Brooke, John Cornford or Guy Burgess. Now, as we trudged across the great Gromboolian plain of the 1950s, they had given up the struggle. Modish undergraduates perched on the arms ...”

“... remarks, though they will seem truisms to many actors, are distanced, as in a time-warp, from Jonathan Miller’s handsome, thoughtful book about ‘directors’ theatre’, Subsequent Performances. This book is, among other things, an apologia for Miller’s own work as a drama director and an essay on the effects ...”

“... Parkinson’s disease, in Ivan Vaughan’s book, becomes a fascinating, even thrilling experience. Jonathan Miller talks in his introduction of Ivan ‘surmounting his disease by regarding it as a treasured possession and not just as an abominable affliction’, and that is exactly right. The experience of the disease becomes a voyage of discovery ...”

“... first set eyes on Peter, at lunch in a restaurant, I think on Goodge Street, with Dudley Moore and Jonathan Miller, the meeting arranged by John Bassett, whose idea it was that we should all work together writing the review that turned into Beyond the Fringe. Having already written while still an undergraduate a large slice of the two West End shows ...”

“... in its own right. It can still be peered into at the National Gallery (at the moment it is part of Jonathan Miller’s exhibition), which also houses the Fabritius picture. Perhaps it is because they deal so magically with light and space that de Hooch’s pictures make you preternaturally aware of the relationship between flat picture and depicted light ...”

“... oughtn’t they to be prepared to take it either way? I know that’s easy to say, and I remember Jonathan Miller once telling me, and convincingly so, that nobody to whom it hasn’t happened can know how peculiarly disagreeable it is to be lampooned in print. But as Goethe said, and I quoted to the famous Jonathan on ...”

“... This compilation arose out of Jonathan Miller’s 1985 production of Don Giovanni for the English National Opera, and his introduction to the book is agreeably illuminating, not least for those who for one reason or another never go to the opera. The main characters of Don Giovanni, he notes, have a prior and conspicuous existence outside the opera, being well-established figures of myth, a fact which both helps and hinders ...”

“... Listener of 1968, and with a rarefied allusiveness in the TLS for 1978, where it is written that Jonathan Miller has a variety of allotropes.The big problems tend to come with the little words, such as all – eight and a half columns in the old text, more than ten in the new; but the old was good enough to provide the substance of the new. I was ...”

“... the Sunday Times Colour Supplement, as well as supplying pocket cartoons for several dailies. Karl Miller, who knew him well both at Cambridge and in London, describes Boxer in his autobiography as ‘both Figaro and the Count’, which may suggest not a blend of patrician wilfulness and backstairs cunning but internal strife between the two. Presumably you ...”

“... give up their boas and beads if they could help it. The revues of the early Fifties which featured Jonathan Miller still had their quota of rouged youths. But at long last the IQ level of the Footlights rose into triple figures. Successively onto the scene came such butch illuminati as Miller, Michael Frayn and Peter ...”

“... that he reckoned it must be penetrated by pores too narrow to be seen or felt out with a probe. Jonathan Miller, in a lucid account of Harvey’s demonstration of the circulation of the blood, reckons that knowledge of pump technology must have had a part in the development of his ideas. You see what you expect to see. Because our textbooks have ...”

“... the bourgeois ‘bad taste’ of Magritte’s house in the Rue des Mimosas in suburban Brussels, Jonathan Miller took off into one of his self-intoxicating fantasies. We were there together in the mid-Sixties to make a film for the BBC, and although I had forewarned him, Jonathan couldn’t believe that this ...”

“... of a television interview I did with the sage in January 1967. It was produced (for Monitor) by Jonathan Miller, and Wain was present. He says he understood nothing of the conversation, and the BBC presumably agreed that it was unintelligible, for it was never transmitted. However, a transcript of the programme was published, and it contains nothing ...”

“... in London’s Fortune Theatre where I was appearing with my colleagues and co-writers Peter Cook, Jonathan Miller and Dudley Moore in Beyond the Fringe.It was a smash hit, with every night the audience studded with celebrities, and accordingly at one performance there was the queen. My particular tour de force in the second half was an Anglican ...”

“... original cast members) and the other three-quarters of the Beyond the Fringe team (Alan Bennett, Jonathan Miller and Dudley Moore), who would go on to present their own take on the nuclear threat, in a sketch called ‘Civil War’.In that sketch, a worried Moore listens trustingly as a succession of posh-voiced government spokesmen seek to reassure him ...”