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“... him with Basil Fawlty. Except that the dying Dennis Potter went further, maybe, when he called John Birt, the BBC’s then director-general, ‘a croak-voiced Dalek’ in 1993. Much expectation surrounded Doctor Who’s return last year, into an industry that has changed vastly since he went away. Mark Thompson, the BBC’s current director-general, sees ...”

“... So we were fed with Swedish folk music, Italian arias, French chansons, German schmaltz and John Philip Sousa. Not so bad actually, because if you put all that together, it becomes what you can hear – well, some of it – on Abba records.To this hodgepodge, known as schlager in its mass-produced pop form, Abba added the Anglo-American songbook ...”

“... learn from the letters people wrote to Carter as from Carter’s writings themselves. Angela Olive Stalker​ was born to a London mother and Scottish father in Eastbourne in May 1940 and raised in Balham in South London. She married Paul Carter in 1960 when she was just twenty, then moved with her husband to Bristol, where she wrote four novels in quick ...”

“... we were all such boys.’ This is how I remember my early days working for the BBC in the 1960s. John Fortune, John Bird, Keith Waterhouse and Willis Hall: we were all such boys too and it seemed such play. Less play was Beyond the Fringe, but that had its sillier side. Dudley Moore had an act – never, I think, done in ...”

“... utterly invisible). The British include, I’m sure, many listeners to Classic FM or, as Hugh Stalker calls them, Saga louts. In the basilica all the seats are now roped off so that one can’t sit down and take it in (let alone pray) but just have to troop round, go with the flow, I suppose. Less magical now than once it seemed, the gold tawdry, the ...”

“... that year they had believed they could win the war.The Spanish flu has turned out to be a silent stalker of history, barely included in lists of the world’s modern afflictions, even though its death toll came close to the combined toll of the two world wars. Laura Spinney – whose book about the Spanish flu, Pale Rider, was published before the arrival of ...”

“... very well that his masculinity is not real, not an essential truth.’ The honour killer is a stalker marking out his territory and policing a boundary between the sexes on which he cannot rely. The fact that her dishonour rubs off on him makes the distinction somewhat shaky, displaying how closely the man and the woman are enmeshed with each other. He ...”