I'll never forget my interview with Barry Humphries - one of the oddest I've ever done. He insisted that for half the time he appeared as Dame Edna. So I interviewed the real Barry Humphries in a suit and tie, and then I interviewed Edna in full fig in her dressing room, where she criticised Barry mercilessly.

Melvyn Bragg

Is it rather stupid and dangerous to take Magna Carta so much for granted, as many of us seem to do, and to think of this attitude as 'very English?'

Melvyn Bragg

Compared to the big 19th-century novelists, I've got a slim volume of work.

Melvyn Bragg

Magna Carta has become totemic. It is in the comedy of Tony Hancock, in the poetry of Kipling, never far from the front pages in a constitutional crisis.

Melvyn Bragg

There are two big beasts in the arts: the BBC and Sky Arts - challenging, leading the way.

Melvyn Bragg

Class doesn't create culture anymore.

Melvyn Bragg

Television, above all, is the place where people can see the world they live in, and if the world they live in is a world without the arts, so much the worse for television, and so much the worse for the viewers.

Melvyn Bragg

I think television does tease out a certain vanity in everybody when you look at yourself and you go, 'Oh Christ.' Maybe that's why my intros get shorter and shorter.

Melvyn Bragg

I'm a class mongrel.

Melvyn Bragg

What artists are doing, and what people who are receiving the arts are doing, is entering into this agreement to occupy a parallel world. The parallel world is ever-expanding. We used to think that it existed only for people who were wealthy, well-born, or educated. It isn't like that.

Melvyn Bragg

It is in our culture that we don't want to admit that our culture is good.

Melvyn Bragg

Magna Carta has 63 clauses in abbreviated Latin. Two of them that are still on the statute book, numbers 39 and 40, could be said to have changed the way in which the free world has grown.

Melvyn Bragg

Too old at 72? Careful. Ageism is out. We'll have the law on you!

Melvyn Bragg

It is very difficult for middle-aged, institutionalised males who have done so well out of subsidy - and, fair play, given much back - to realise that there is a time to be a well-heeled revolutionary.

Melvyn Bragg

More people go to Tate Modern than watch the Arsenal.

Melvyn Bragg

It's amazing that Sky is the only place that has two dedicated arts channels. The BBC is doing very well... but why don't they do more?

Melvyn Bragg

Like university science departments, the arts have shown how they can earn their way and point to an economically newborn future for this country. They show that the U.K. could be a prime provider of imaginative riches and intellectual adventure, which I think are the two great prizes of the 21st century.

Melvyn Bragg

Miliband failed us, his Labour supporters. And Labour will now, because of him, be in a disaster zone for a long time.

Melvyn Bragg

I don't feel inferior in the slightest to anybody - or superior to anybody, let's get that clear. But I do feel different.

Melvyn Bragg

The success of the arts has come through a mix of public subsidy, substantial private support, and good box-office receipts, but central to Labour's post-1997 programme has been a determination to increase access as much as excellence.

Melvyn Bragg

The class barricades have been stormed by the forces of a broad culture, which is made up of clusters of individuals who have decided for themselves what they will be in society.

Melvyn Bragg