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“... could do more with a Dalek would be to unite 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 ...”

“... as all O and A-level candidates know, endlessly, remorselessly, ‘develop’? Admittedly, Stephen Potter’s The Muse in Chains had offered to blow the gaff in 1937. But pell-mell postwar expansion, to say nothing of Potter’s decline into a chronicler of comfy national foibles, soon settled its hash. ‘English’ seemed ...”

“... the voices of her predecessors: Arlington Park a take on Mrs Dalloway, The Country Life a take on Jane Eyre and Cold Comfort Farm, itself indulging in metacommentary on one of her most beloved authors, D.H. Lawrence. You are reminded of Frederica Potter (or A.S. Byatt herself) reading English at Newnham, trying to figure ...”

“... Francisco courts – the best the prosecution could muster was a private English tutor called Gail Potter who attested: ‘You feel like you’re going through the gutter when you have to read that stuff.’ Ginsberg is mainly in triumphant mood, playing off the costive disapproval of the squares – Trilling: ‘I’m afraid I have to tell you I don’t like ...”

“... Picturedrome on Wortley Road. Here were Alexis Smith, Eve Arnold, Charles Boyer, and Tarzan’s Jane (and Mia Farrow’s mother) Maureen O’Sullivan. The four of us from Beyond the Fringe had been invited as a unit and Dudley Moore had been prevailed on (may even have volunteered) to play the piano. With Coward in the room this was perhaps foolhardy and ...”

“... not just for Edge of Darkness, but for Alan Bleasdale’s Boys from the Blackstuff (1981), Dennis Potter’s sexually provocative and formally challenging Singing Detective (1986) and Richard Eyre’s film of Charles Wood’s anti-Falklands Tumbledown (1988). When a newly aggressive ITV, freed from its franchise limitations by the 1990 Act, decided to make ...”

“... There were many who hoped for a similar meeting of minds by saying they were reading Harry Potter, but to this the Queen (who had no time for fantasy) invariably said briskly, ‘Yes. One is saving that for a rainy day,’ and passed swiftly on. Seeing her almost daily meant that Sir Kevin was able to nag the Queen about what was now almost an ...”

“... flag mask, Park View recently hosted a visit from the Royal College of Defence Studies and a Harry Potter Trivia Evening; it had a Christmas card competition, and one girl was picked to meet Prince William. The school leadership is new, the trust that oversees the running of the school has a new name and the school itself will shortly get a new name too; the ...”

“... well have replied by pointing out that he was perfectly happy to have learned his basic craft from Jane Austen rather than Henry James. He maintained that the way to write novels was not to have a complex programme but in each case to do whatever was justified by results. He discusses with civilised humour the questions of story and the plot, allows for the ...”