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“... life during World War Two. And second, comedy also has an extra appeal – at least for Jonathan Lynn and me – when it is actually about something, in the sense that Butterflies and The Good Life are about something.Johnny and I were writing the first script of Yes, Minister at the time that I was deeply involved with Milton Friedman in developing his ...”

“... getting some decent attention lately. Last year saw the publication of The Devil’s Cormorant by Richard King, a fine study of several species of the bird on several continents, as well as an argument against its shabby treatment in the US. In 2012 Denis Wild published The Double-Crested Cormorant: Symbol of Ecological Conflict. A decade earlier, Lyanda ...”

“... of Banks material, catalogued by Warren Dawson in 1958, that is currently held at Kew Gardens. Lynn Barber’s The Heyday of Natural History: 1820-1870 is a colourful account of the Victorian popularisation and commercialisation of natural history. Popular natural history, as Ms Barber presents it, was an extension of Joseph Banks’s drawing-room ...”

“... material for biographers and Patton has had a dozen already, to say nothing of a film that brought Richard Nixon great consolation during the lonely watches of the Watergate nights. Only Erwin Rommel can match Patton in the publicity stakes, and he was a very much duller man. For the British, Patton may have been a minor if spectacular figure in World War ...”

“... Oxford, ranger of Snowdon Forest, or high steward of Windsor, Bristol, Reading, Abingdon, King’s Lynn, Great Yarmouth, Wallingford, Tewkesbury and St Albans – that he didn’t manage to visit Kenilworth once during the first three years he owned it. Despite the elaborate heraldry he had carved into the walls of the castle, he was an arriviste; though ...”

“... survival, perhaps doomed to be bred out in the long run as savages became civilised, rather like Richard Dawkins’s view of the religion meme? Is that the implication? If so, this is precisely the opposite of the Christian view, especially in the Middle Ages, that shedding tears was the sign of an advanced soul, one which had been pierced by God. This ...”

“... a swansong of passivity in the drawing-room; and, above all, the opera libretti he wrote for Richard Strauss: Elektra, Der Rosenkavalier, Ariadne auf Naxos, Die Frau ohne Schatten and Arabella. These, I would say, constitute half a safety-net, half a ball and chain, meaning that Hugo von Hofmannsthal (1874-1929) won’t ever go away. All the same, when ...”

“... most charming editor-presenter of the arts’ he rates the accolade of his own Spitting Image. Lynn Barber may have famously delineated his ‘awful smug matey blokiness’ in the pages of the Independent on Sunday, but perhaps that only demonstrates what an inviting target Bragg has become. As a character in Kingdom come (1980) explains, ‘the rules are ...”

“... surviving texts written in England on paper are the town registers begun by the port towns of Lynn and Lyme Regis in 1307 and 1309 respectively. Such registers were central to the most important rituals of the urban political calendar, when the town accounts were displayed to the citizenry for assent. Few would have been able to spot anything amiss, but ...”

“... In The Crucible of Creation (1998) he attacked Gould, ‘biting the hand that once fed him’ as Richard Fortey put it in his review, in a way that made ‘a shoal of piranha seem decorous’.* The range of evolutionary options is tightly constrained, he insisted, and wherever there is life, on earth or any other planet, human-like creatures are likely to ...”

“... circumvented the King-quota limit by bringing out five surplus horror tales under the pseudonym ‘Richard Bachman’. Unfortunately the Bachman books’ disguise was eventually penetrated. But, more significantly, their appeal was drastically altered when their true authorship was publicised. As King observed, Thinner sold 28,000 by ...”

“... their littleness. ‘Franco’ is ‘mysterious’, but Franco is not. In a video interview with Lynn Hirschberg of the New York Times, Franco explained that he was deliberately casting mystery aside. I was always taught, like, ‘Don’t do too many interviews, don’t do too many talk shows, don’t reveal too much of yourself as an actor, because then ...”

“... for various cables, weights and masts picked up by his tenants, before selling them to shipmen in Lynn and Lowestoft for more than five times that.But it wasn’t really about the money. As Sir Edward Rodney put it in 1628, quibbling over a ‘small bark’ wrecked in the Bristol Channel, ‘the goods are but of small value … but the consequence is ...”

“... and so never lived to know what I have known – the Beatles, black power, the Administration of Richard Nixon – all this has taken place in a trivial after-time and has nothing to do with anything that really mattered, with summer and someone hardly remembered, a youth so abruptly translated from vivid, well-loved (if briefly) flesh to a few scraps of ...”

“... that these ‘docu-dramas’ are a new phenomenon, a modern hybrid. Those with long memories cite Richard Brooks’s 1967 film In Cold Blood as a prototype. Based on Truman Capote’s account of a quadruple murder in rural Kansas, the film was shot in vérité black and white and used the actual locations where the killings took place. But the true crime ...”