The British hamburger thus symbolised, with savage neatness, the country's failure to provide its ordinary people with food which did anything more for them than sustain life.

Anyone afraid of what he thinks television does to the world is probably just afraid of the world.

All intellectual tendencies are corrupted when they consort with power.

Stop worrying, nobody gets out of this world alive.

The repeat run of Fawlty Towers (BBC2) drew bigger audiences than ever and deservedly so. Statistical surveys reveal that only the television critic of the Spectator is incapable of seeing the joke, which is that Basil Fawlty has the wrong temperament to be a hotel proprietor, just as some other people have the wrong temperament to be television critics.

One way or another, all the poets of the thirties and forties reacted to Auden, either by rejecting him or trying to absorb him.

I won't have to miss smoking any more. Nobody smokes where I'm going: It's like a row of restaurants in California.