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.
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.
There are two big beasts in the arts: the BBC and Sky Arts - challenging, leading the way.
Class doesn't create culture anymore.
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.
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.
I'm a class mongrel.
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.
It is in our culture that we don't want to admit that our culture is good.
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.
Too old at 72? Careful. Ageism is out. We'll have the law on you!
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.
More people go to Tate Modern than watch the Arsenal.
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?
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.
Miliband failed us, his Labour supporters. And Labour will now, because of him, be in a disaster zone for a long time.
I don't feel inferior in the slightest to anybody - or superior to anybody, let's get that clear. But I do feel different.
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.
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.
I do think the BBC could do more, but I've always thought the BBC could do more - I think there should be more arts programmes full stop.
As the 20th century unspooled, a cultural warming melted down many frozen class characteristics.
There is an army of the informed wanting to be more informed.
If I meet pals, we do hug each other, and it's very nice, you know... it's something that's come on me late and became second nature, and it's first nature now!
Britain is undoubtedly becoming more cultural. No question of it. People who say it is dumbing down simply don't look around enough. They don't know enough.
Love of place is one of the characteristics I enjoy most about novelists.
We were working class, and you don't lose that. Later on, I bolted on media middle class... and now people like me are in the House of Lords.
There is some brilliant pop music and some very poor classical music. And why shouldn't comedy be treated as seriously as drama?
The abolition of slavery was driven by the King James Bible. It gave slaves a common language and purpose.
We listened to a lot of drama, adaptations of books, comedy. There was a real love of music expressed in choirs, because you didn't have to have instruments except your voice.
Craig has explored the darker recesses of 007's psyche. He has shown us the lonely man. And he has shown him falling truly in love.
Connery made Bond real through his physicality. He did most of his own stunts and fights, and the audience knew it was him.
In the 40 or so years I've known David Puttnam, not only has he pursued an outstanding career in films and now politics, but he has been the keeper of the flame of the British film industry.
There's a lot of hours in the week if you use them properly.
Dame Barbara Cartland was an endearing eccentric, and when I interviewed her, she wanted me to listen to her dictating to her secretary one of those romantic novels that she turned out fortnightly.
Well, I don't think I'm good-looking... I know people who are good-looking, and I'm not good-looking.
You ask 20 of your friends how English and American democracy came about. None of them would say that Anglicanism or Protestantism had anything to do with it. But it was crucial to it!
Few places on earth have been as affectionately alchemised into literature as the Lake District.
I don't feel like I'm slowing down.
My life is not very different from what it was 20 years ago. In fact, my career hasn't changed much since I was 22.
I was brought up in a strong working-class community by working-class parents and relations until I was 18, and that's what I really am. Now all sorts of things have been added, but that's what I am.
I decided years ago that I am just unfashionable.
I'm not a fan of the working class being mocked, including by some of our famous writers - even those who came from it.
I've been making arts programmes for almost 50 years, and every day, I can't believe my luck.
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.
The best of pop in our country is among the best of the arts that we do. And Britain does the arts as well as, and sometimes better than, anybody else on the planet.
I don't believe in a personal God, no. And I don't believe in resurrection as it is in the New Testament.
We start out as sand and soot out there in the universe, and who knows, in 40 trillion years' time we might come back. But if we come back without memory, it doesn't really interest me.
In a sense, Bond ousted the cowboy as the screen hero, and Ken Adams replaced the horse with technology.
It was my idea for high culture and popular culture to be treated equally.
