“Beautifully shot, impeccably paced, it was a clear, unrelenting look at the National Trust, its friends and enemies, and it makes you want to burn your passport and beg the Luftwaffe to have another go.”

We like to see death as an unfair conspiracy, and what we want is a magic practitioner, a combination of Dr Watson and Sherlock Holmes.

We like to see death as an unfair conspiracy, and what we want is a magic practitioner, a combination of Dr Watson and Sherlock Holmes.

Facts are what pedantic, dull people have instead of opinions.

The reason that chefs become chefs is that they’re not allowed into rooms with windows.

My father was a film-maker. He always said he wanted to go like Humphrey Jennings, the legendary director who stepped backwards over a cliff while framing a better shot.

The interesting adults are always the school failures, the weird ones, the losers, the malcontents, this isn’t wishful thinking. It’s the rule.

America didn’t bypass or escape civilization. It did something far more profound, far cleverer: it simply changed what civilization could be.

The truth and the facts aren’t necessarily the same thing. Telling the truth is the object of all art; facts are what the unimaginative have instead of ideas.

Television gives us the gift to see ourselves as we’d like to be seen.

Science fiction is never about the future, in the same way history is rarely about the past: they’re both parable formats for examining or commenting on the present.

Breakfast is everything. The beginning, the first thing. It is the mouthful that is the commitment to a new day, a continuing life.

Sport is how poor kids from poor countries pass through the eye of the needle to riches and recognition.

Americans think the only funny Brits are John Cleese, Benny Hill and whoever makes our toothpaste. They’re not laughing with us, they are laughing at us.

You either get the point of Africa or you don’t. What draws me back year after year is that it’s like seeing the world with the lid off.

I don’t know how long a child will remain utterly static in front of the television, but my guess is that it could be well into their thirties.

Nobody ever forgets their first night in the bush. It’s among the precious, meagre handful of life firsts that remain indelible.

The enemy is within the gates; it is with our own luxury, our own folly, our own criminality that we have to contend.

The greatest enemy of authority, therefore, is contempt, and the surest way to undermine it is laughter.

A man’s greatest moment in life is when his enemy lays vanquished, his village aflame, his herds driven before you and his weeping wives and daughters are clasped to your breast.

Demoralize the enemy from within by surprise, terror, sabotage, assassination. This is the war of the future.

Men, the enemy troops you can see are all that stands between us and the place we have for so long been determined to reach. We must find a way to eat them alive!

A man’s greatest joy is crushing his enemies.

Doubt and fear are the great enemies of knowledge, and he who encourages them, who does not slay them, thwarts himself at every step.

Your enemies can kill you, but only your friends can hurt you.