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" Magna Carta has become totemic. It is in the comedy of Tony Hancock, in the poetry of Kipling, never far from the front pages in a constitutional crisis. "

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" My memory seems to be holding on quite well. There is no reason why it shouldn't if you keep training it. "

" I am 74 now. Looking back, I have a sense of not really being in control of my career. I just went where it took me. "

" Dame Barbara Cartland was an endearing eccentric, and when I interviewed her, she wanted me to listen to her dictating to her secretary one of those romantic novels that she turned out fortnightly. "

" There is some brilliant pop music and some very poor classical music. And why shouldn't comedy be treated as seriously as drama? "

" I don't feel inferior in the slightest to anybody - or superior to anybody, let's get that clear. But I do feel different. "

" I'm a class mongrel. "

" I think television does tease out a certain vanity in everybody when you look at yourself and you go, 'Oh Christ.' Maybe that's why my intros get shorter and shorter. "

" Like university science departments, the arts have shown how they can earn their way and point to an economically newborn future for this country. They show that the U.K. could be a prime provider of imaginative riches and intellectual adventure, which I think are the two great prizes of the 21st century. "

" Well, I don't think I'm good-looking... I know people who are good-looking, and I'm not good-looking. "

" One of the great things about making 'Reel History' was meeting British people from all over the class system. It made me realise that London is a different country. "

" I've been making arts programmes for almost 50 years, and every day, I can't believe my luck. "

" I don't go around thinking I'm attractive or not attractive. It has never occurred to me. People don't think like that where I come from... No one has ever said, 'Oh, he's a good-looking bloke.' They just didn't use those words about men. "

" Now, perfectly ordinary people will give each other hugs. I mean, it used to be that a hug was reserved for if you came back from Australia - you know, back in the '40s and '50s. "

" The class barricades have been stormed by the forces of a broad culture, which is made up of clusters of individuals who have decided for themselves what they will be in society. "

" The success of the arts has come through a mix of public subsidy, substantial private support, and good box-office receipts, but central to Labour's post-1997 programme has been a determination to increase access as much as excellence. "

" In a sense, Bond ousted the cowboy as the screen hero, and Ken Adams replaced the horse with technology. "

" I do think the BBC could do more, but I've always thought the BBC could do more - I think there should be more arts programmes full stop. "

" I don't want closure, I don't know what that means or why you would want it. "

" The BBC does a sterling job, but I'd like to see it do more. ITV does four arts programmes a year; it used to be 28. At least Sky, with its two arts channels, is trying. "

" Connery made Bond real through his physicality. He did most of his own stunts and fights, and the audience knew it was him. "

" I have written favourably in support of subsidy for the arts since the 1960s, and I continue to believe absolutely in subsidy, as I do in the BBC licence fee. "

" Love of place is one of the characteristics I enjoy most about novelists. "

" The driving force behind 'In Our Time' is that I want an education. I want to know more about science, say, and if I want to know, then other people probably do, too. "

" We got a copy of the 'New Statesman' at my grammar school in Wigton, Cumbria, in the 1950s. It sat mint fresh every week on the library table, with two or three other bargain-offer magazines. The 'Statesman' came out of the unimaginable Great World. I started to read it then and have pegged along ever since. "

" What artists are doing, and what people who are receiving the arts are doing, is entering into this agreement to occupy a parallel world. The parallel world is ever-expanding. We used to think that it existed only for people who were wealthy, well-born, or educated. It isn't like that. "

" The abolition of slavery was driven by the King James Bible. It gave slaves a common language and purpose. "

" Compared to the big 19th-century novelists, I've got a slim volume of work. "

" Television, above all, is the place where people can see the world they live in, and if the world they live in is a world without the arts, so much the worse for television, and so much the worse for the viewers. "

" In music, the Specials brought a city, Coventry, bombed out for a second time and riven with racism, to a celebration between black and white musicians and their music. "

Black And White

" In an arts programme, my job was to go where the talent was. And the talent was in popular culture. "