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" Miliband failed us, his Labour supporters. And Labour will now, because of him, be in a disaster zone for a long time. "

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" 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. "

" I just got fed up with the Protestantism that I'd been brought up with being rubbed out, disregarded. There's an awful lot of frailty and doubt about it, which I understand and share, but there are certain things you just have to acknowledge. "

" You ask 20 of your friends how English and American democracy came about. None of them would say that Anglicanism or Protestantism had anything to do with it. But it was crucial to 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" Grime reminds me, if there is an echo, of sort of near enough like Liverpool in the very early Sixties. It's a lot of kids obsessed with music - obsessed with it. "

" The best of pop in our country is among the best of the arts that we do. And Britain does the arts as well as, and sometimes better than, anybody else on the planet. "

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

" 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. "

" Magna Carta has 63 clauses in abbreviated Latin. Two of them that are still on the statute book, numbers 39 and 40, could be said to have changed the way in which the free world has grown. "

" The theatre always seems to be in trouble but always thriving. It's deeply comical to me that we agonize about our crap football teams and indifferent Test sides when in front of our noses is a great world success story that no one's interested in apart from those who work in it. "

" My life is not very different from what it was 20 years ago. In fact, my career hasn't changed much since I was 22. "

" It is in our culture that we don't want to admit that our culture is good. "

" I don't feel like I'm slowing down. "

" That's why writing is important to me. Time goes past, and you've been somewhere and come back that hasn't hurt you, and you've been somebody else. "

" Once, the arts were opera, ballet, classical music, and everything else deemed highbrow. "

" Darwin talks about evolution, but he doesn't say how it started. Maybe the sense of mystery will dissolve in the face of science, but I am not so sure. We are all described by the human genome, but it's getting people nowhere. "

" 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

" I enjoy writing. Would I rather be playing golf? No. Would I rather be fishing? No. "

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

" 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. "

" It was my idea for high culture and popular culture to be treated equally. "

Popular Culture

" 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. "

" Sometimes, you're just moved by people's journeys. "

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

" Craig has explored the darker recesses of 007's psyche. He has shown us the lonely man. And he has shown him falling truly in love. "

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

" We were working class, and you don't lose that. Later on, I bolted on media middle class... and now people like me are in the House of Lords. "