Few artists were ever fully well, so it is no great trick to prove them ill. There are commentators who can't get interested in Caravaggio until they… - Clive James

I still haven’t forgiven C. S. Lewis for going on all those long walks with J. R. R. Tolkien and failing to strangle him, thus to save us from hundreds of pages dripping with the wizardly wisdom of Gandalf and from the kind of movie in which Orlando Bloom defiantly flexes his delicate jaw at thousands of computer-generated orcs. In fact it would have been ever better if C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien could have strangled each other, so that we could also have been saved from the Chronicles of Narnia.

Everybody caught one another's eye with a 'Spot the loon' look when [Tony] Benn was talking. The show was probably true to life, since each minister had a vested interest in briefing the journalist chosen to play him. It's a sweet technique for getting at the truth, so I imagine someone will put a stop to it soon enough.

It often happens that we are most touched by what we are least capable of. Evanescent delicacy is not the quality in the arts that I admire most, but it is often the characteristic by which I am most reduced to envy.