Even in moments of tranquility, Murray Walker sounds like a man whose trousers are on fire.

"Nationwide" featured an amazing collection of apprentice impersonators. From all over Britain, schoolchildren materialised via local studios to give us their imitations of the mighty. There were at least three uncannily accurate Margaret Thatchers, their eyelids fatigued with condescension and their voices swooping and whining like dive-bombers.

She [Marilyn Monroe] was good at being inarticulately abstracted for the same reason that midgets are good at being short.

Jack Aubrey is a tremendous tower of strength and you always want to read about him.

Sick of being a prisoner of my childhood, I want to put it behind me.

All television ever did was shrink the demand for ordinary movies. The demand for extraordinary movies increased. If any one thing is wrong with the movie industry today, it is the unrelenting effort to astonish.

The inevitable effect of a biographer's hindsight is to belittle the subject's foresight.