Sadly, as with so much about history's heroes, it's the spotting of potential fame that's the difficulty, whether it's publishing their poems, hanging their paintings, or buying their old underwear. Think of the great men whose lives passed in penury and hacking coughs due to public unawareness that their littlest possession would end up at Sothebys or the basement at Fort Knox.
Alan CorenI sometimes wonder if the manufacturers of foolproof items keep a fool or two on their payroll to test things.
Alan CorenSince both its national products, snow and chocolate, melt, the cuckoo clock was invented solely in order to give tourists something solid to remember it by.
Alan CorenTelevision is more interesting than people. If it were not we should have people standing in the corner of our room.
Alan Coren10.30 Newsnight: What Are The Chances Of World War Three Breaking Out After You Have Gone To Bed?
Alan CorenDemocracy consists of choosing your dictators, after they've told you what you think it is you want to hear.
Alan CorenThere are many mysteries in old age but the greatest, surely, is this: in those adverts for walk-in bathtubs, why doesn't all the water gush out when you get in?
Alan CorenEnglish Bohemianism is a curiously unluscious fruit. ... Inside this hothouse, huge lascivious orchids slide sensuously up the sweating windows, passion-flowers cross-pollinate in wild heliotrope abandon, lotuses writhe with poppies in the sweet warm beds, kumquats ripen, open and plop flatly to the floor-and outside, in a neat, trimly-hoed kitchen-garden, English bohemians sit in cold orderly rows, like carrots.
Alan CorenThe role of humour is to make people fall down and writhe on the Axminster, and that is the top and bottom of it.
Alan CorenJacob is a German Shepherd. (I have never understood why they aren't called German Sheepdogs. What do the Germans call shepherds?)
Alan CorenCan anything match that first fine discovery of the telephone and all it stood for? That first realization that, contained within ten simple digits, lay the infinitely possible? Out there ... lay six billion ears, all the people in the world available for contact and mystery and insult, unable to resist the beckoning of one small and villainous forefinger.
Alan Coren