Stephen Fry

The Fry Chronicles: An Autobiography
by Stephen Fry
Published 27 Sep 2010

Also by Stephen Fry FICTION The Liar The Hippopotamus Making History The Stars’ Tennis Balls NON-FICTION Paperweight Moab is My Washpot Rescuing the Spectacled Bear The Ode Less Travelled: Unlocking the Poet Within Stephen Fry in America with Hugh Laurie A Bit of Fry and Laurie A Bit More Fry and Laurie Three Bits of Fry and Laurie Fry and Laurie Bit No. 4 The Fry Chronicles STEPHEN FRY MICHAEL JOSEPH an imprint of PENGUIN BOOKS MICHAEL JOSEPH Published by the Penguin Group Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)

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Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd) Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd) Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi – 110 017, India Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd) Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England www.penguin.com First published 2010 Copyright © Stephen Fry, 2010 The moral right of the author has been asserted All rights reserved Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN: 978-0-14-196957-2 To M’Coll Contents Introduction C is for C12H22O11 for Cereal, for Candy, for Caries, for Cavities, for Carbohydrates, for Calories C is for Cigarettes for Convict, for Cundall, for Corporal Punishment, for Common Pursuit, for Cessation 1.

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It is more than possible that you find the cuddly Dudley and the even cuddlier Alan Bennett and Michael Palin much more likeable than their tall, aloof and rather forbidding Cambridge counterparts. And perhaps this extends down to the later incarnations – Oxford’s Rowan Atkinson and Richard Curtis are shorter and surely sweeter than the lofty and fractious Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie. Cableknit Pullover, Part 1. The backlit ears of Hugh Laurie, gentleman. Cableknit Pullover, Part 2. There is tremendous romance in the cavalier tradition and absolutely none in the puritan. Oscar Wilde was an Oxford man, and a great part of me is deeply drawn to the Oxford of the aesthetic movement, Arnold’s ‘Scholar-Gipsy’ and the Dreaming Spires.

The Four Horsemen
by Christopher Hitchens , Richard Dawkins , Sam Harris and Daniel Dennett
Published 19 Mar 2019

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA Names: Hitchens, Christopher, author. | Dawkins, Richard, author. | Harris, Sam, author. | Dennett, D. C. (Daniel Clement), author. | Fry, Stephen, writer of foreword. Title: The four horsemen : the conversation that sparked an atheist revolution / Hitchens, Dawkins, Harris, Dennett ; foreword by Stephen Fry. Description: First U.S. edition. | New York : Random House, [2019] Identifiers: LCCN 2019004626 | ISBN 9780525511953 (hardback) | ISBN 9780525511960 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Atheism. | Hitchens, Christopher. | Dawkins, Richard | Harris, Sam | Dennett, D. C. (Daniel Clement) Classification: LCC BL2747.3 .H58 2019 | DDC 211/.8--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019004626 Hardback ISBN 9780525511953 Ebook ISBN  9780525511960 randomhousebooks.com Cover design: Rachel Ake CONTENTS COVER TITLE PAGE COPYRIGHT FOREWORD STEPHEN FRY THE HUBRIS OF RELIGION, THE HUMILITY OF SCIENCE, AND THE INTELLECTUAL AND MORAL COURAGE OF ATHEISM RICHARD DAWKINS Science is often accused of arrogantly claiming to know everything, but the barb is capaciously wide of the mark.

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(Daniel Clement) Classification: LCC BL2747.3 .H58 2019 | DDC 211/.8--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019004626 Hardback ISBN 9780525511953 Ebook ISBN  9780525511960 randomhousebooks.com Cover design: Rachel Ake CONTENTS COVER TITLE PAGE COPYRIGHT FOREWORD STEPHEN FRY THE HUBRIS OF RELIGION, THE HUMILITY OF SCIENCE, AND THE INTELLECTUAL AND MORAL COURAGE OF ATHEISM RICHARD DAWKINS Science is often accused of arrogantly claiming to know everything, but the barb is capaciously wide of the mark. LETTING THE NEIGHBOURS KNOW DANIEL C. DENNETT Any who search the transcription of our discussion for either a monolithic shared creed or a contradiction suppressed for political reasons will come up empty-handed.

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IN GOOD COMPANY SAM HARRIS Is there a distinction between believing things for good reasons and believing them for bad ones? THE FOUR HORSEMEN: A DISCUSSION RICHARD DAWKINS, DANIEL C. DENNETT, SAM HARRIS, CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS DEDICATION ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS FOREWORD STEPHEN FRY ‘Do you believe in God?’ ‘A question of little value. Which god? Ganesh? Osiris? Jove? Jehovah? Or one of the tens of thousands of animist gods worshipped every day around the globe?’ ‘Oh, very well then, if you’re going to get clever – any god.’ ‘Do I believe in “any god”?’ ‘Look, there’s a creation, isn’t there?

Stephen Fry in America
by Stephen Fry
Published 1 Jan 2008

Iacobelli Copyright Section opener collages: photographs taken by Vanda Vucicevic for Stephen Fry in America © West Park Pictures 2008. Other photographs © Sarah Hanson (with the exception of church in Section One opener collage © Getty Images). Collages © West Park Pictures & Sarah Hanson 2008. Commissioned by HarperCollins Publishers Ltd. All rights reserved. Map fragments courtesy of the University of Texas Libraries, the University of Texas at Austin. STEPHEN FRY IN AMERICA. Copyright © 2008 by Stephen Fry and West Park Pictures Ltd. Map and artwork collages © 2008 by West Park Pictures and Sarah Hanson.

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Stephen Fry in America Photographs by Vanda Vucicevic For Steve. Who so nearly existed… Contents Introduction New England and the East Coast Maine New Hampshire Massachusetts Rhode Island Connecticut Vermont New York New Jersey Delaware Pennsylvania Maryland and Washington D.C. South East and Florida Virginia West Virginia Kentucky Tennessee North Carolina South Carolina Georgia Alabama Florida The Deep South and the Great Lakes Louisiana Mississippi Arkansas Missouri Iowa Ohio Michigan Indiana Illinois Wisconsin Minnesota The Rockies, the Great Plains and Texas Montana Idaho Wyoming North Dakota South Dakota Nebraska Kansas Oklahoma Colorado Texas The Southwest, Pacific Northwest, California, Alaska and Hawaii New Mexico Utah Arizona Nevada California Oregon Washington Alaska Hawaii American English Quiz State Capital Quiz Acknowledgements About the Author Credits Copyright About the Publisher INTRODUCTION I was so nearly an American.

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You would have to be sullen and curmudgeonly indeed not to be enchanted, intoxicated and thrilled to the soles of your boat-shoes by this fabulous (and fabulously expensive) class of sailing. Farewell, Rhode Island. Farewell too any lingering belief that America might be a classless society…I luff myself silly at such a thought. The crew, doing something nautical. CONNECTICUT ‘My travels so far have already taught me that Nature did not fashion Stephen Fry to serve in submarines…’ Only Delaware and neighbouring Rhode Island are smaller than the Constitution State. As it happens, the seven smallest states in mainland America are all in New England and most, like Connecticut, make up in history, wealth, population density and dazzling scenery what they lack in size.

David Mitchell: Back Story
by David Mitchell
Published 10 Oct 2012

I just had to hope that something would come out of that year’s Edinburgh Fringe, where we were doing two shows: a rewritten version of Innocent Millions and, as I mentioned before, a production of the Stephen Fry play, Latin! To save money, we didn’t hire a flat of our own to stay in but slept on the floor of Rob’s girlfriend Leila’s brother’s friend’s living room. Latin! was a success. I think it was a good production and Rob and I played our parts well, but most of the credit should go to Stephen Fry for the very funny script he’d written nearly two decades earlier and for the draw of his name. But we enjoyed good reviews, packed houses and, most excitingly of all, an answerphone message of support left on Christopher Richardson’s voicemail by Fry himself.

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But we enjoyed good reviews, packed houses and, most excitingly of all, an answerphone message of support left on Christopher Richardson’s voicemail by Fry himself. We were fucking thrilled. I know there is considerable televisual evidence that I have both met and worked with Stephen Fry lots of times, but that was all years ahead of me at this stage – so being in a show he knew about and was enthusiastic about was a crumb of affirmation on which I feasted. The fact that Latin! was a hot ticket that year had surprisingly little knock-on effect on sales for Innocent Millions. But then the play-watching, Radio 4-listening Stephen Fry fans attracted by Latin! probably weren’t in the market for new comedy from the unheard-of, especially when they’d already seen them in one show and were in the perfect place to watch new comedy by the very-much-heard-of.

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The audition I was most excited about, and felt I had the least chance of succeeding in, was for the Footlights pantomime, Cinderella. As a comedy-obsessed teenager, I’d obviously heard of Footlights. It was the club of which so many of the comedians I admired seemed to have been members: Peter Cook, John Cleese, Douglas Adams, Stephen Fry – these were the brightest stars in the firmament but, like a night sky in the countryside, the more you looked, the more stars you saw: writers like Michael Frayn and Clive James; producers like David Hatch, John Lloyd and Jonathan James Moore; directors like Jonathan Miller and Trevor Nunn; actors like Eleanor Bron, Miriam Margolyes and Simon Jones; Cecil Beaton, Germaine Greer, Bill Oddie, Julian Slade.

After Steve: How Apple Became a Trillion-Dollar Company and Lost Its Soul
by Tripp Mickle
Published 2 May 2022

They warned him: Interview with Patrick Pruniaux. He grew sick: Parker, “The Shape of Things to Come.” Some observers speculated: “Fortune 500,” Fortune, 2015, https://fortune.com/fortune500/2015/search/. In advance of the change: Stephen Fry, “When Stephen Fry Met Jony Ive: The Self-Confessed Tech Geek Talks to Apple’s Newly Promoted Chief Design Officer,” Telegraph, May 26, 2015, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/apple/11628710/When-Stephen-Fry-met-Jony-Ive-the-self-confessed-fanboi-meets-Apples-newly-promoted-chief-design-officer.html. Chapter 14: Fuse the iPhone business: Apple Inc., 2015 Form 10-K for the year ended September 26, 2015, (filed October 28, 2011), p. 30, SEC, https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/320193/000119312515356351/d17062d10k.htm.

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He bowed, with a grin, before Princess Anne, the queen’s daughter, and kneeled as she tapped his left and right shoulders with a sword that had belonged to her grandfather King George VI. Later that day, Ive shed the tails and tie for a reception at the Ivy, an exclusive restaurant in the heart of London’s West End. The Design Council had rented a private room with stained-glass windows and assembled a guest list of Ive’s friends, including the actor Stephen Fry, Duran Duran front man Simon Le Bon, and the influential designers Paul Smith and Terence Conran. Ive’s sister, Alison, and his mother and father were there, as well. As the attendees sipped champagne and nibbled on appetizers, Ive mingled with a smile. The room grew quiet when former prime minister Gordon Brown, who had supported Ive’s knighthood, proposed a toast.

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Ive eventually arrived at a nearby courtyard where friends and special guests had gathered before the company’s product showcase. The designer moved through a small crowd that included the media titan Rupert Murdoch and NBA star Kevin Durant. A New Yorker writer at work on a profile shadowed Ive as he sipped coffee and chatted with longtime friends, including Coldplay singer Chris Martin and the actor Stephen Fry. As the New Yorker writer asked questions, Ive fidgeted with his fingers. It was all so strange, he explained. “You go from something that you feel very protective of, and you feel great ownership of, and suddenly it’s not yours anymore, and it’s everybody else’s,” he said. His philosophical musing disguised his stress about the day ahead.

That Sugar Book: This Book Will Change the Way You Think About 'Healthy' Food
by Damon Gameau
Published 12 Mar 2015

The good news, according to many experts, is that the brain can develop healthy eating habits just as quickly as it develops bad ones. I will discuss how I successfully changed my eating habits later in the book (see here). I recently had the great pleasure of spending a day with actor and encyclopaedic wordsmith, Stephen Fry. He has been a terrific supporter of the film and agreed to take part in both a sketch and also give us an interview. He spoke very candidly about his own battles with sugar addiction. For him, it began as a child when he would sneak down into the kitchen in the middle of the night to sprinkle sugar onto butter.

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When sugar is combined with these types of foods then problems can occur. ‘I HAD A “WHITE OUT”. I SAID I AM NOT GOING TO EAT ANYTHING WHITE: PASTA, RICE, POTATOES AND SUGAR, AND IT WORKED REALLY WELL FOR ME. I AM AWARE THAT I PUT ON WEIGHT VERY QUICKLY WITH CARBOHYDRATES AND THE ONE MOST RESPONSIBLE IS SUGAR.’ STEPHEN FRY, COMEDIAN, ACTOR, WRITER, PRESENTER AND ACTIVIST MR SUGAR SONG From the ‘Mr Sugar’ song in the film (he describes where you might find him): I’m in cola, granola and pasta sauce Mushy peas, mac ‘n’cheese and that radish from a horse, Canned fruits and soups, even soup in a satchel And Mr Sugar loves the term ‘All Natural’ White bread, corn chips, muffin mix, gravy, Mayonnaise, satays, food for the baby Baked beans for the teens and an energy drink And I’m clearly going to be in any food that’s pink I’m confessing I’m in dressing and a hamburger bun Where that cheeky corn syrup’s trying to steal all my fun Muesli bars, even some cigars and a whole range of marmalade and honey jam jars A TIP ABOUT LOSING WEIGHT Understanding the role of glycogen also helped me lose weight quickly.

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Damon Herriman for his Mountain Dew Mouth story at a café. All the kind people who agreed to be interviewed: David Wolfe, Michael Moss, Kelly Brownell, Kimber Stanhope, Jean-Marc Schwarz, Professor Nick Allen, Eric Stice, Sonja Yokum, Kathleen DesMaisons, Thomas Campbell, Kathleen Page, Dr Edwin Smith, Larry Hammons & family, Leonard Burton, Stephen Fry, Danielle Reed, Julie Menella, Howard Moskowitz, Cristin Kearns, Barry Popkin, Aaron Matheson, Dr John Sievenpiper. BIBLIOGRAPHY & SUGGESTED READING BOOKS Bennett, Connie and Stephen Sinatra. 2006, Sugar Shock! Penguin, New York Gillespie, David. 2008, Sweet Poison. Penguin Books Australia, Sydney Kessler, David A. 2010, The End of Overeating.

Losing the Signal: The Spectacular Rise and Fall of BlackBerry
by Jacquie McNish and Sean Silcoff
Published 6 Apr 2015

Fishman, “What Happened to Motorola,” Chicago Magazine, August 25, 2014. 11 David Pogue, “No Keyboard? And You Call This a BlackBerry?” New York Times, November 27, 2008. 12 Stephen Fry, “Gee, One Bold Storm Coming Up …,” www.stephenfry.com, December 11, 2008, www.stephenfry.com/2008/12/11/gee-one-bold-storm-coming-up/. 13 Rory Cellan-Jones, “Can Stephen Fry Kill a Gadget?” dot.life blog, BBC News, November 27, 2008, www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/legacy/technology/2008/11/can_stephen_fry_kill_a_gadget.html. 14 Amol Sharma and Sara Silver, “BlackBerry Storm Is Off to Bit of a Bumpy Start,” Wall Street Journal, January 26, 2009. 12 / OFFSIDE 1 Oral Ruling of the Ontario Securities Commission, “In the Matter of Research in Motion Limited, James Balsillie, Mike Lazaridis, Dennis Kavelman, Angelo Loberto, Kendall Cork, Douglas Wright, James Estill and Douglas Fregin,” February 5, 2009, p. 2. www.osc.gov.on.ca/documents/en/Proceedings-RAD/rad_20090521_rim_set.pdf. 2 Two weeks later the Washington-based Securities and Exchange Commission unveiled a settlement requiring the RIM executives to pay an additional $1.4 million in penalties for the options backdating and disgorge an additional $843,415. 3 Janet McFarland, “OSC Slaps RIM Officials with $77-Million Payment,” Globe and Mail, February 5, 2009. 4 United States Bankruptcy Court, District of Arizona, In re Dewey Ranch Hockey, LLC, Coyotes Holdings, LLC, Coyotes Hockey, LLC and Arena Management Group LLC, debtors, case no: 2:09-bk-09-09488-RTBP, “PSE Sports and Entertainment LP’s position on August 5 sale hearing and August 3 NHL sale rescheduling motion,” Doc. 533, filed July 31, 2009, p. 5. 5 Sinclair Stewart and Paul Waldie, “Beware Balsillie’s Competitive Fever,” Globe and Mail, June 15, 2007. 6 United States Bankruptcy Court, District of Arizona, In re Dewey Ranch Hockey, LLC, Coyotes Holdings, LLC, Coyotes Hockey, LLC and Arena Management Group LLC, debtors, case no: 2:09-bk-09-09488-RTBP, “Declaration of Craig Leipold,” Doc. 585, filed August 7, 2009, p. 2. 7 Ibid., Exhibit A. 8 The Competition Bureau of Canada did make inquiries into NHL practices in 2007, but the file was closed within weeks. 9 United States Bankruptcy Court, District of Arizona, In re Dewey Ranch Hockey, LLC, Coyotes Holdings, LLC, Coyotes Hockey, LLC, and Arena Management Group, LLC, debtors, case no: 2:09-bk—09-09488-RTBP, “Declaration of Craig Leipold,” Doc. 585, filed August 7, 2009, p. 5. 10 Ibid. 11 Reyes eventually sold his stake in the San Jose Sharks after a prolonged legal battle that saw his conviction overturned, then reinstated in 2010 after a second trial. 12 United States Bankruptcy Court, District of Arizona, In re Dewey Ranch Hockey, LLC, Coyotes Holdings, LLC, Coyotes Hockey, LLC, and Arena Management Group, LLC, debtors, case no: 2:09-bk—09-09488-RTBP, “Supplemental submission of the National Hockey League in support of motion for a determination that debtors’ NHL membership rights may not be transferred to PSE or an affiliate thereof,” Doc. 879, filed September 1, 2009, p. 2. 13 Based on author search of Factiva online database.

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“Head-bangingly frustrating,” said New York Times columnist David Pogue in a scathing critique two days after Storm went on sale.11 “Storm had more bugs than a summer picnic,” he wrote, going on to list a litany of complaints: “Freezes, abrupt reboots, nonresponsive controls, cosmetic glitches.” Raising a question quietly asked by numerous RIM employees, the Times reviewer concluded, “How did this thing ever reach the market? Was everyone involved just too terrified to pull the emergency brake on this train?” British actor and gadget reviewer Stephen Fry was similarly caustic. A fan of Apple products and BlackBerry’s Bold, Fry complained about the absence of wi-fi, a free local network application available on iPhone. As for Storm’s touch screen, he described the “judder, lag and jerk” of the click-screen keyboard as “a painful horror.”12 He compared typing an e-mail to “an antelope trying to open a packet of cigarettes.”

QI: The Book of General Ignorance - The Noticeably Stouter Edition
by Lloyd, John and Mitchinson, John
Published 7 Oct 2010

A Quite Interesting Book THE BOOK OF GENERAL IGNORANCE The Noticeably Stouter Edition John Lloyd and John Mitchinson Table of Contents Title Page FOREWORD | Stephen Fry FO(U)R(E) Words | Alan Davies INTRODUCTION | John Lloyd How many wives did Henry VIII have? How many nostrils have you got? Where is the driest place on earth? Where are you most likely to get caught in a hailstorm? Where is the highest mountain? What’s the name of the tallest mountain in the world? What’s the largest living thing? What’s the biggest thing a blue whale can swallow? Which bird lays the smallest egg for its size?

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Can you name an Irish saint? What nationality was the Duke of Wellington? Who was Britain’s first Prime Minister? Who invented the Penny Post? What do you get when you’re 100 years old? EPISODES WHAT IS QUITE INTERESTING? INDEX About John Lloyd and John Mitchinson Copyright FOREWORD | Stephen Fry People sometimes accuse me of knowing a lot. ‘Stephen,’ they say, accusingly, ‘you know a lot.’ This is a bit like telling a person who has a few grains of sand clinging to him that he owns much sand. When you consider the vast amount of sand there is in the world such a person is, to all intents and purposes, sandless.

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As a result of these simple theories, the programme has been a runaway success on BBC2, where it consistently beats much better-publicised, supposedly ‘trendier’ programmes in the ratings, and is watched by more young people than anything else on the channel. It is by far the most popular programme on BBC4 (and has been since the channel’s launch) and consistently tops the ratings on the thrusting commercial outfit Dave. In 2009, QI is transferring to BBC1. Stephen Fry, we regret to announce, will not be appearing in a leotard. This edition contains an index, fifty extra questions, a smattering of new cartoons by the talented Mr Bingo, and an appendix detailing all the editions of the TV show made to date. In deference to the transfer of QI to BBC1, it also includes some sixty excerpts from the programme itself, to give newcomers a sense of how the raw information of QI research is smelted into jokes.

Time Travel: A History
by James Gleick
Published 26 Sep 2016

— WHEN THEY DID start trying to change history, so many of them came up with the perfect plan. They tried to kill Hitler. They are still trying, to this day. It’s easy to see why. Others have done great evil and caused great suffering (Stalin, Mao…), but one man looms above the others with his combination of monstrosity and charisma. “Adolf Hitler. Hitler, Hitler, Hitler,” says Stephen Fry, in his time-travel novel, Making History. If only Hitler can be unmade. The entire twentieth century gets a do-over. The idea arose even before the United States entered the war: the July 1941 issue of Weird Tales featured a story called “I Killed Hitler” by Ralph Milne Farley, pseudonym for a Massachusetts politician and pulp writer, Roger Sherman Hoar.

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There is no universal continuum, Henry. There are only billions of individuals, each with his own continuum; and one continuum cannot affect the other. We’re like millions of strands of spaghetti in the same pot….Each of us must travel up and down his strand alone.” From branching paths to spaghetti strands. In Stephen Fry’s variation, the hero is a student historian named Michael Young. (One wonders—why do our imaginative time-travel writers keep naming their characters Young?) In this variation, he hopes to change history not by assassinating Hitler but by sterilizing his father: “The historian as God. I know so much about you, Mr.

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Eliot, Four Quartets, 1943. Harlan Ellison, “The City on the Edge of Forever” (Star Trek), 1967. Ralph Milne Farley, “I Killed Hitler,” 1941. Jack Finney, “The Face in the Photo,” 1962. Time and Again, 1970. F. Scott Fitzgerald, “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,” 1922. E. M. Forster, The Machine Stops, 1909. Stephen Fry, Making History, 1997. Rivka Galchen, “The Region of Unlikeness,” 2008. Hugo Gernsback, Ralph 124C 41+: A Romance of the Year 2660, 1925. David Gerrold, The Man Who Folded Himself, 1973. William Gibson, “The Gernsback Continuum,” 1981. The Peripheral, 2014. Terry Gilliam, Twelve Monkeys, 1995.

Content Provider: Selected Short Prose Pieces, 2011–2016
by Stewart Lee
Published 1 Aug 2016

Gratifyingly, the me in the stories wasn’t really me. He was a character, a kind of would-be bohemian columnist version of me, eager to impress, pleased with his own cleverness, fabricating meetings with Kurt Cobain and imagining shared-stage-fright ferry flights across the English Channel with Stephen Fry. At least, I assume it was a character of sorts, one that I consciously created to provoke myself into the generation of copy, but I can’t be sure. Who was I then? What was I thinking? I may be reverse-engineering a truth I wish existed. Sadly, looking at the magazine pages, I appear to have allowed myself to be photographed for my byline picture in a south London greasy spoon, young and gaunt and smoking a cigarette, which suggests a blurring of the boundaries.

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Undoubtedly, listening to Claudia Winkleman while contemplating Quarry Bank Mill might help to sensualise the horrors of Industrial Revolution working conditions. And we will one day wonder how we managed to enjoy the 520 acres of Felbrigg Hall without a bench upon which visitors have been invited to “rest their weary bottoms” by Stephen Fry. To be fair, Winkleman and Fry are among the best television personalities available, turnips in a sea of turds. But, as a National Trust member, the speaking-celebrity-bench scheme causes me to contemplate the cliché of dumbing down. (As does the Trust’s website for Felbrigg Hall, inviting visitors to “look in the library, the ‘internet’ of the 18th century”.

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The National Trust was subliminally directing the way I responded, emotionally, to the raw material of the property, constructing a narrative that it wanted me to follow, to the exclusion of my own interpretation. What was the National Trust? The very name seemed suddenly sinister, the sort of newspeak name you would give an organisation that was neither national nor trustworthy. It seemed like the sort of organisation that would give a bench the voice of Stephen Fry, not trusting its foolish patrons to have their own thoughts while contemplating the hills, the clouds, the future, the past, thinking of things near, and thinking of things far. If Damon Albarn is serious about the occult, shouldn’t we call him Damien? Observer, 10 July 2011 The seventeenth-century witchfinder general, Mary Hopkin, roamed Essex on top of a horse, burning witches and stuffing her bearded face with purloined olden-days tavern fayre – crusty bread rolls, steak-and-ale pies and banana splits.

Transcend: The New Science of Self-Actualization
by Scott Barry Kaufman
Published 6 Apr 2020

The frenzy of renown: Fame and its history. New York: Vintage Books. 53. Roberts, John Cacioppo, who studied effects of loneliness, is dead at 66. 54. Levine, N. (2016). Stephen Fry reveals he attempted suicide after interviewing a homophobic Uganda politician. NME. Retrieved from http://www.nme.com/news/tv/stephen-fry-reveals-he-attempted-suicide-after-int-884674. 55. Fry, S. (2013). Only the lonely. Stephen Fry. Retrieved from http://www.stephenfry.com/2013/06/only-the-lonely. 56. Emma Seppälä, personal communication, July 1, 2016. 57. Emma Seppälä, personal communication, July 1, 2016. 58.

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A lot of athletes often feel lonely. Lots of people want to be their friend, but how would you feel if all the people who want to be your friend, you had the alternative interpretation that they want material or social benefits that you could give them.”53 Take the wildly popular and openly gay novelist Stephen Fry, who attempted suicide after interviewing a Ugandan politician who sought to make homosexuality punishable by death.54 Soon after the encounter, Fry “paced around trying to analyse what it was that had disappeared from me. It seemed as though the whole essence of me had disappeared. Everything that was me was no longer there.

And Away...
by Bob Mortimer
Published 15 Sep 2021

In the earlier series we always tried to fill the guest slots with celebrities that we either knew or had a connection with, since they were always a lot more open to the gentle ribbing that they were subjected to – people like Martin Clunes, Jonathan Ross, Paul Whitehouse, Robbie Williams, Hale and Pace, Caroline Aherne, Patsy Kensit, David Baddiel, Stephen Fry, Noddy Holder, Chris Rea and Neil Morrissey. As time went on, high-profile guests would agree to appear simply because their children were fans of the show. One of the most important aspects of Shooting Stars was the way the celebrities were treated in the studio. We never told them what questions or tasks they would be facing, and I think many of them had an almost visible feeling of dread as they took their seats at the start of the show.

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This was very much the popular venue for media types throughout the ’90s, and there was a bit of a gang of us that were regulars. I would probably go there two or three nights a week, usually with Mark Lamarr. Mark was the best company you could wish for, and incredibly knowledgeable about any topic you cared to raise; the Swindon Stephen Fry. We could make each other laugh like a couple of chipmunks who’d just discovered a takeaway nut-and-seed outlet. We used to dare each other to play the Herbert in front of some of the big stars that would be in the club. One night Brad Pitt was in there drinking and I asked Mark to go up to him and ask him how many people were killed in the movie Seven.

Sarah Millican--The Queen of Comedy
by Tina Campanella
Published 14 Apr 2017

It was certainly innovative in its content, but it was also the first radio comedy programme to be produced in stereo, and was unique in its use of music and sound effects, winning a number of awards. In 1988, Radio 4 became the first home of the classic improvisation show Whose Line Is It Anyway, which featured a young Clive Anderson as host and John Sessions and Stephen Fry as regular guests. Created by Dan Patterson and Mark Leveson, the radio series consisted of six episodes, and had such wide appeal that it was instantly snapped up by Channel 4 to be made into the hugely successful television show version. In more recent times, the station also launched the career of Steve Coogan, when it first broadcast the current affairs parody show On the Hour in 1991.

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As well as revue shows, the Edinburgh Fringe increasingly became a home for the what became known as the one-man-show, which allowed every actor with an idea they were keen to develop, the chance to turn it into a show and put it on for an audience willing to see something new and untested. In 1981, a Cambridge Footlights revue called The Cellar Tapes, featuring Stephen Fry, Hugh Laurie, Emma Thompson and Tony Slattery, with extra material by Sandi Toksvig among others, went down a storm, winning the inaugural Perrier Award. The award, for the best show in the Fringe, had been set up to support young and up and coming talent. It provided the spur needed to draw more comedy acts to the Fringe and soon all of the country’s funniest people were doing their best to be crowned the best act there.

How Music Got Free: The End of an Industry, the Turn of the Century, and the Patient Zero of Piracy
by Stephen Witt
Published 15 Jun 2015

An eight-picture movie deal with Warner Brothers had turned young stars Emma Watson and Daniel Radcliffe into household names. The literary franchise comprised the bestselling narrative in the history of publishing and the movie franchise held the highest worldwide box office receipts in the history of cinema. The audiobook version shared in this popularity. Narrated by the beloved British comedian Stephen Fry, it, too, was the bestselling audiobook in the history of the medium. Rowling’s personal story was heartwarming. She was a divorced single mother who’d written the bulk of her first book while collecting public assistance. The first edition of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone had been commissioned for a modest print run of 1,000 copies—those editions were now worth tens of thousands of dollars.

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In the wake of raids on both Oink and the Pirate Bay, anonymity was critical, and the new operators were determined not to repeat Ellis’ mistakes. Within a few years What.cd’s music archive grew to surpass even Oink’s at its peak. Among the torrents it hosted were more than 45 different versions of Pink Moon, as well as a 15-gigabyte torrent of the 154-hour, 103-CD set of Stephen Fry reading all 4,224 pages of the Harry Potter series in its entirety. Torrent traffic was cresting worldwide, and by some estimates represented as much as one-third of all prime-time Internet traffic. Whatever the Crown’s goals were in prosecuting Ellis, one thing was clear: the prosecution had no deterrent effect.

Animal: The Autobiography of a Female Body
by Sara Pascoe
Published 18 Apr 2016

And of course that was the Cambridge don’s problem: it gave Essex girls in their mum’s clothes the audacity to think they might understand anything. But I didn’t know that yet. I was so exhilarated being in that ancient churchy building, and I had another interview that I wasn’t late for. I told this much more Normally Aged Man that I wanted to be in Footlights and then famous and, hopefully, friends with Stephen Fry. NAM Anything else? Apart from acting? SARA I’m going to write a book about sex and my generation. NAM Why? SARA I just think it’s really interesting. NAM Why? SARA It’s really interesting. In the back of the car on the way home I tried to read a book about Wittgenstein, but I kept getting distracted by my own excitement at how well I’d nailed the interviews and how much fun I was going to have being in Footlights.

…

And it would be scary to move away from home, but I would expand my mind and learn to ride a bike and have a little bed in a little room and fall in love with an intellectual boy who was homosexual and I was VERY surprised to receive a rejection letter two weeks later. Clearly they weren’t as hungry for commoners as Aunty Juliet had led me to believe. ‘At least you got an interview,’ my mum kept telling me. That was half my lifetime ago and look at me now, curled up with you and Stephen Fry, reading a book I wrote about sex and my generation. I think it’s really interesting and I hope you find lots to think about too. Dream big, kids. May all your rejections quickly become laughable, because anyone who says no to you is an idiot. Xxxxx Important question before we start … * My name doesn’t have an ‘h’ on it, but it’s pronounced Sarah not Sah-rah.

QI: The Second Book of General Ignorance
by Lloyd, John and Mitchinson, John
Published 7 Oct 2010

A Quite Interesting Book THE SECOND BOOK OF GENERAL IGNORANCE John Lloyd and John Mitchinson Table of Contents Title Page FORETHOUGHT | Stephen Fry SECOND THOUGHTS | John Lloyd and John Mitchinson THE SECOND BOOK OFGENERAL IGNORANCE Who made the first flight in an aeroplane? How many legs does an octopus have? What colour are oranges? What’s the name of the most southerly point of Africa? What’s the hardest known substance? What’s the strangest substance known to science? At what temperature does water freeze? Where is the largest known lake? Where is the world’s saltiest water?

…

What effect does testosterone have on men? After a disaster, what’s the greatest threat to the water supply? What positive effect did the Great Fire of London have? Can anything live forever? THE USES OF INTERESTINGNESS INDEX About the Author By the Same Authors Copyright FORETHOUGHT | Stephen Fry Now, what I want is facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts: nothing else will ever be of any service to them. This is the principle on which I bring up my own children, and this is the principle on which I bring up these children.

Split-Second Persuasion: The Ancient Art and New Science of Changing Minds
by Kevin Dutton
Published 3 Feb 2011

Nicholas and H. Jean Birnbaum, Men Who Rape: The Psychology of the Offender (New York, NY: Plenum Press, 1979). 23 A similar phenomenon … I first heard about ‘the gift’ or ‘posing up’ in a 2007 BBC television documentary called ‘HIV and Me’ presented by Stephen Fry (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/tvandradio/3668295/Last-night-on-television-Stephen-Fry-HIV-and-Me-BBC2—Great-British-Journeys-BBC2.html). Though not a common practice, my experience in San Francisco corroborates what Fry discovered – that this is a custom found among a small minority of the gay community. 1 ‘The order in which you give information …’ Nicholas Lemann.

The Alternative: How to Build a Just Economy
by Nick Romeo
Published 15 Jan 2024

It was good of the economists to apologize to the queen, but as the favorite poet of an earlier Queen Elizabeth wrote, “Though thou repent, yet I have still the loss / The offender’s sorrow lends but weak relief / To him that bears the strong offense’s cross.”9 It’s not surprising that people trying to enrich themselves by any means do not automatically contribute to the welfare and flourishing of society. A better question is how so many people came to believe this in the first place. EXIT MORALITY, PURSUED BY AN ECONOMIST In 1989, the young British comedy duo Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie vividly brought to life philosopher David Gauthier’s description of economic markets as a “morally free zone.”10 In a sketch called “Bank Loan,” Laurie plays a businessman seeking a loan, and Fry is a banker. When Fry asks what product he’s hoping to market, Laurie produces two small sachets.

…

William Shakespeare, “Sonnet 34: Why Didst Thou Promise Such a Beauteous Day,” Poetry Foundation, accessed December 8, 2022, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/90049/sonnet-34-why-didst-thou-promise-such-a-beauteous-day. 10. David Gauthier, Morals by Agreement (Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1986), https://doi.org/10.1093/0198249926.001.0001. 11. Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie, “Bank Loan,” A Bit of Fry & Laurie, accessed December 28, 2022, https://abitoffryandlaurie.co.uk/sketches/bank_loan. 12. Karl Marx, “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. Karl Marx 1852,” accessed December 9, 2022, https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1852/18th-brumaire/ch01.htm. 13.

One Leg Out: A Tragicomic Memoir
by Carla Day
Published 20 Sep 2018

The sky is gloomy, a monotonous stream of grey, no depth, just endless pale mist. Brrr. I’m going to spice things up a bit in the bedroom. Things have dried up because of my eternal lack of libido. When I say things, I mean my vagina — why do I cringe and bite my lip when I say that word? It’s drier than Stephen Fry’s sense of humour, drier than the Sahara, you get the picture. I have tried topical creams and local estrogen pessaries and none of them really do anything to moisten up the area apart from a bit of Vaseline. I think I need to be in the right headspace for self-moisturising. I recently learned from a daytime chat show that if you don’t have regular sex during the menopause, it — my vagina, cringe — could literally shrink inside and scar tissue could form and Oh-My-God, that is just another shocking fact about the menopause.

I Think You'll Find It's a Bit More Complicated Than That
by Ben Goldacre
Published 22 Oct 2014

Some discussed chiropractic’s dubious origins: it was invented by a magnet therapist, convicted of practising medicine without a licence, who suddenly decided in 1895 that 95 per cent of all diseases are caused by displaced vertebrae, and compared himself to Christ, Mohammed and Martin Luther. Who knew? An international petition against the BCA has been signed by professors, journalists, celebrities and more, with Ricky Gervais and Stephen Fry alongside the previous head of the Medical Research Council and the last government Chief Scientific Adviser. There have been public meetings, with stickers and badges. But it is a ragged band of science bloggers who have done the most detailed work. Fifteen months after the case began, the BCA finally released the academic evidence it was using to support its specific claims.

…

sa=t&source= web&ct=res&cd=1&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.bmj.com%2F&ei=VURwSp3tMMahjAfo282hBQ&usg=AFQjCNFrgA5ACj4Qwf7dYRivBOSsYx2Hrg&sig2=2-JerEf-4W8otKp9mO4J7A The Times: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/article6426195.ece Daily Mail: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-1196696/Back-cures-brave-scientist-epic-court-battle-How-Britains-libel-laws-threatening-free-speech.html Daily Telegraph: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/science-news/5442522/Stephen-Fry-and-Ricky-Gervais-defend-science-writer-sued-for-libel.html Independent: http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families/features/jeremy-laurance-the-libel-laws-that-threaten-to-stifle-scientific-debate-1744810.html Nature: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v459/n7248/full/459751a.html Economist: http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?

American Secession: The Looming Threat of a National Breakup
by F. H. Buckley
Published 14 Jan 2020

In Victorian England, John Stuart Mill called this the dreaded censorship of social custom, and in today’s America too there are things that cannot be said, ideas that cannot be expressed. Sometimes that’s for the good, sometimes not. In either case it explains why many Europeans, from Stendhal in the nineteenth century to Stephen Fry today, have thought America less free than France or England. The way in which the received ideas of the day constrain what is permissible to express was something George Orwell saw when he warned against Soviet communism after the Second World War. Four publishers turned down Animal Farm, in one case after the British Ministry of Information objected that the Soviets might take offense since they were so clearly the book’s target.

No Such Thing as Society
by Andy McSmith
Published 19 Nov 2010

Alternative comedy assumed a high level of education in its audience, and relied on sharp social observation and energetic delivery. There had been no very notable additions to the nation’s comedians since the Monty Python team of ten years earlier, until suddenly Rowan Atkinson, Rik Mayall, Dawn French, Jennifer Saunders, Nigel Planer, Ade Edmondson, Hugh Laurie, Stephen Fry, Ben Elton, Harry Enfield and many more tumbled into the public eye, becoming the idols of a generation. To begin with, there was Not the Nine O’Clock News, the show that made stars out of Atkinson and three other unknowns. It was the brainchild of John Lloyd, a Cambridge graduate with a law degree, who had gone into radio hoping to be a performer or a scriptwriter, but ended up as a producer and discovered a valuable talent for manoeuvring his way through the internal politics of the BBC.

…

Splendidly played by Miranda Richardson, Elizabeth has about as many good jokes as Blackadder himself.15 The formula was used for two more series, though it never worked quite so well without Miranda Richardson. Blackadder the Third made a star of Hugh Laurie, playing the idiotic Prince Regent. In Blackadder Goes Forth, the role of brainless boss went to Stephen Fry, as General Melchett. Set in the trenches in the First World War, it invited comparisons and contrasts with ’Allo, ’Allo, one of the most popular comedy series of the late 1980s, which also was unlike anything else that had ever been seen on British television. It supposedly had a historical setting, in Nazi-occupied France, but did not make the least pretence of realism.

Talk to the Tail: Adventures in Cat Ownership and Beyond
by Tom Cox
Published 1 Jan 2011

.’ – Christopher Walken, ‘What I’ve Learned’, American Esquire magazine, June 2009 ‘If animals could speak, the dog would be a blundering outspoken fellow, but the cat would have the rare grace of never saying a word too much.’ – Mark Twain ‘A bear doesn’t go to sleep thinking, “I wasn’t really a very good bear today.” They are just 100 per cent bear, whereas human beings feel we’re not 100 per cent human. We’re constantly striving towards something, to some fulfilment.’ – Stephen Fry ‘It’s dog eat dog, and cat eat mouse, you can rag mama rag all over my house.’ – The Band, ‘Rag Mama Rag’ Contents War Baby Animals I Have Considered Stealing. Number One: The People Sheep The Man Who Cried Chaffinch Excerpts from a Cat Owner’s Diary Heavyosity Animals I Have Considered Stealing.

Explore Everything
by Bradley Garrett
Published 7 Oct 2013

If you would like to have a party at the top of Centre Point, you can either get a job with the Confederation of British Industry or the Chinese oil company Petrochina, or hire the viewing gallery for a group of thirteen to sixty people after applying for membership, where aspiring members will be ‘assessed’ by a panel that includes English actor Stephen Fry. If you’ve got cash or fame or know the right people, you might just get in. Alternatively, when you arrive in Chernobyl, you could pay off a guard in Vodka or cash to let you sneak off on your own and walk at your own pace, seeing parts of the site few tourist ever have. If you’re caught, you may end up lighter in the pocket, or you might acquire a heavier dose of radiation than you’d prefer, but you’ll have seen it.

The Midnight Library
by Matt Haig
Published 12 Aug 2020

‘Well, that’s the beauty, isn’t it? You just never know how it ends.’ And Nora smiled as she stared at all the pieces she still had left in play, thinking about her next move. ‘A rollicking time-hopping fantasy’ Observer ‘A novel with enormous heart’ Daily Express ‘Matt Haig is astounding’ Stephen Fry

Planes, Trains and Toilet Doors: 50 Places That Changed British Politics
by Matt Chorley
Published 8 Feb 2024

Like boxers heading to the ring, they paraded along a red carpet which ran the length of the arena and onto the stage, beneath huge flags of the UK, England, Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland and the EU, fluttering thanks to carefully positioned fans in the rafters. They had thought of everything. There were celebrity video messages from the DJ Paul Gambaccini, the athlete Steve Cram, the astrophysicist Stephen Hawking and actors including Alan Rickman, Stephen Fry, Emma Thompson, John Mortimer and Sir Richard Attenborough. Simply Red’s Mick Hucknall was filmed filling in his postal vote, singing his song ‘Something Got Me Started’ while praising the prospect of a Labour government which would ‘invest in skills’. I swear this is all true. They had thought of everything, even the things which might have been better left unthought.

The Capitalist Manifesto
by Johan Norberg
Published 14 Jun 2023

Can we even find a single collective project that would make Patrick Deneen, Noreena Hertz, Joel Halldorf and Nina Björk cuddle together in communitarian hygge? Even then we are still only talking about a small homogeneous group of Western intellectuals who demand a collective political project. What does the collective utopia look like that would fill the empty hearts of such diverse people as Stephen Fry, MrBeast, Elon Musk, Billie Eilish, Roger Federer, Mario Vargas Llosa, Danielle Steel, Richard Dawkins, PewDiePie, Robert Downey Jr, Nick Cave, LeBron James, Larry David, Donald Trump, Kylie Jenner, The Rock, Boris Johnson, Quentin Tarantino, Posh Spice, Robert Smith, Chris Rock, Blixa Bargeld, Neal Stephenson, Kim Kardashian, Lionel Messi, Johan Norberg and some 7.9 billion more?

Starstruck: The Business of Celebrity
by Currid
Published 9 Nov 2010

Twitter, the online social-messaging and “microblogging” system accessible by personal digital assistant (PDA) applications, short message service (SMS) text messaging, or computer, tantalizes with the question: “What are you doing?” Users are challenged to answer in 140 characters or fewer, and they do. Dozens and dozens of times per day. We “follow” (in Twitter-speak) people’s lives via a click of a button, and people follow ours as well. Britney Spears does it. So does British comedian Stephen Fry and Hollywood heartthrob Ashton Kutcher. So does one of my favorite economists. And my graduate school adviser. And my husband (though, recently, I’ve put a stop to that). And yet their status updates, or tweets, as it were, would lead us to believe they have extraordinarily exciting lives (which some of them surely do)…so extraordinary it’s a wonder they have time to do anything other than live it.

Underground, Overground
by Andrew Martin
Published 13 Nov 2012

I read about this novel in Walk the Lines (2011), by Mark Mason, who did not himself walk every street in London but conquered his own ‘horizontal Everest’ by walking the length of every Underground line. The book conveys a fascination with the Underground, and with the sights that can be glimpsed by not being on it. For example, ‘Round the corner on Hyde Park Gardens a van bears the logo, “Stephen Fry Plumbing and Heating Limited”.’ The period from 1930 to 1950 was one of continuous suburbbuilding. In London: A History (2009) Jeremy Black writes: ‘The sprawl was aided by lax planning regulations, as well as the break-up of estates, in part due to death duties, … the low price of land, and the post-war agricultural depression which encouraged farmers to sell land in order to survive.’

The Age of Stagnation: Why Perpetual Growth Is Unattainable and the Global Economy Is in Peril
by Satyajit Das
Published 9 Feb 2016

In their 1968 Lessons of History, historians Will and Ariel Durant concluded that increased concentration of income and wealth promotes social tensions, which are resolved by state action to drastically reduce wealth or by popular revolutions that end up redistributing dysfunction and poverty. At its apogee, the Piketty craze included T-shirts bearing the equation r > g, and speculation about who would play him in the film version (Colin Firth and Stephen Fry were favorites). By the end of 2014, Capital was following a trajectory identified by journalist Robert Shrimsley. 16 In stage one, economists discuss the idea, believing that their own standing and credibility require it. Reviews in serious media, opinion pieces, commentaries, blogs, and the like multiply rapidly.

How to Fail: Everything I’ve Ever Learned From Things Going Wrong
by Elizabeth Day
Published 3 Apr 2019

A lot of my job involved going to parties and sidling up to famous people I’d never met before, then asking them an impertinent question designed to make an entertaining titbit for the next day’s paper. ‘Oh how fun,’ people would generally say when I told them. And I would reply that yes, yes it was and then I’d regale them with the time I met Stephen Fry at the Cannes Film Festival or the occasion on which I’d told Kate Winslet my house-mate kept rewinding the bits in her biopic of Iris Murdoch where she went swimming naked in the river (she looked taken aback, which is understandable given that the film is an emotionally draining tale of one of our finest modern writers’ descent into the ravages of Alzheimer’s.

Work! Consume! Die!
by Frankie Boyle
Published 12 Oct 2011

Everyone says it’s because the cartilage is destroyed but I think it’s because her head is so empty it’s created a vacuum and her face has collapsed in on itself. This is the trouble with going to see a cowboy doctor – he took her money, he’s knocked down a supporting wall and hasn’t been back to finish the job. On the plus side, he did put a lovely serving hatch in the back of her head. Stephen Fry also admitted to ‘15 years of chronic cocaine taking’ and would tackle difficult crosswords while high. A stark warning to Charlie Sheen of what could happen if he doesn’t get help. Charlie made his webcast debut with a show he called Charlie’s Korner. Can’t be long before the guest presenter is Charlie’s Coroner.

So Me
by Graham Norton
Published 2 Jan 2005

I had to agree because I had thought the same myself, but nevertheless, having someone tear your first TV show apart isn’t quite what you want while your theme music is still ringing in your ears. It would be another few months before I fully realised the significance of that phone call. That first series was full of highs and lows. Guests like Lorraine Kelly and Stephen Fry were brilliant, but other people proved difficult. Kylie Minogue seemed incapable of telling one of her own anecdotes. At the time I thought it was because I was gay and so not flirting with her properly, but I’ve since seen her do it on other shows. She smiles and laughs, but never really engages with the interviewer.

Unequal Britain: Equalities in Britain Since 1945
by Pat Thane
Published 18 Apr 2010

Studies in the 1990s showed that Black people were more likely to receive ‘physical’ treatments (drugs and electro-convulsive therapy) than their White counterparts.34 African people were likely to be given higher doses of medication in comparison with other groups, and stood a greater chance of receiving this by intramuscular means, which can be very painful.35 Black people were less likely to be offered counselling, other talking treatments or non-medical interventions than White people, and were rarely offered counselling in any language but English.36 There are no good statistics on the treatments most often given to Asian, South-east Asian or Irish people. DISABILITY 181 CONCLUSION The continued inequalities experienced by those suffering from mental disability have been highlighted by high-profile figures such as Stephen Fry, Adam Ant and Terry Pratchett discussing their personal difficulties, suggesting how little public attitudes have changed, even towards relatively privileged people. Asked by an audience of psychiatric students and practitioners at a seminar on bipolar disorder at St Andrew’s University why he had made a television programme about his experiences, Fry stated: I’m in a rare and privileged position of being able to help address the whole business of stigma, and why it is that the rest of society finds it so easy to wrinkle their noses, cross over, or block their ears when confronted with an illness of the mind and of the mood – especially when we reach out with such sympathy towards diseases of the liver or other organs that don’t affect who we are and how we feel in quite such devastating complexity.37 Adam Ant’s documentary about his experiences of bipolar disorder, The Madness of Prince Charming, appeared on Channel 4 TV in July 2003 and was one of the station’s most-watched programmes that year.

Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages
by Guy Deutscher
Published 29 Aug 2010

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I am extremely grateful to those friends who gave generously of their time to read earlier drafts of the entire book, and whose insights and suggestions saved me from copious blunders and inspired many improvements: Jennie Barbour, Michal Deutscher, Andreas Dorschel, Avrahamit Edan, Stephen Fry, Bert Kouwenberg, Peter Matthews, Ferdinand von Mengden, Anna Morpurgo Davies, Reviel Netz, Uri Rom, Jan Hendrik Schmidt, Michael Steen, and Balázs Szendri. The manuscript benefited enormously from the professional scrutiny of my agent, Caroline Dawnay, and my editors, Drummond Moir, Jonathan Beck, and above all Sara Bershtel, whose incisive insertions and excisions were invaluable for navigating out of numerous cul-de-sacs and wrong turnings.

The English
by Jeremy Paxman
Published 29 Jan 2013

For the dark secret about this apparently thoroughbred Englishman is that Wharton himself is half German, the descendant of Jews who did well in the Bradford wool trade. It is the same with so many who most loudly proclaim their Englishness. The journalist Peregrine Worsthorne, whose Sunday Telegraph columns thundered throughout the 1980s about the dangers to the integrity of England, had a father who rejoiced in the name of Colonel Koch de Gooreynd. Stephen Fry, who made his acting career playing the quintessential English butler, Jeeves, is half Hungarian-Jewish. The surname of that ‘most English’ of popular poets, John Betjeman, was German Dutch; the ‘quintessentially English’ architect Lutyens was descended from a Schleswig-Holstein family. Many of those Conservatives who shouted most loudly about protecting England from takeover by the European Union, like Michael Howard and Michael Portillo, came from immigrant families.

A Year of Living Danishly: My Twelve Months Unearthing the Secrets of the World's Happiest Country
by Helen Russell
Published 14 Sep 2015

The Irish tricolour means St Patrick’s Day, Guinness and theme pubs. The Welsh dragon makes me think of rugby, or some sort of male voice choir. During the London 2012 Olympics, the Union Jack had a brief reprise as a symbol of pride rather than a suspect political statement. Suddenly, our flag meant Stephen Fry; French and Saunders; ginger nuts and Churchill. Overnight, it became OK to be proud of our nation – for a fortnight, at least. And it felt good. So I can’t help thinking that the Danes might be on to something here with all their flag waving. Lego Man and I carefully fold up the Swiss banner and we send our soon-to-be-40 bachelor home with this and a care-package of all things Danish to remember the weekend by.

Mindf*ck: Cambridge Analytica and the Plot to Break America
by Christopher Wylie
Published 8 Oct 2019

Between my bleached platinum-blond hair, complete with a classic mid-noughties fringe, and his dandified manner of dress, we were drawn together like two butterflies at a moth convention. The son of a family of Jewish antique dealers on London’s Portobello Road, Gettleson is posh, eccentric, and delightfully camp and speaks with a delivery reminiscent of the actor Stephen Fry. In another time, he would have been a dandy in the salons of eighteenth-century London. He’s a polymath of the highest order. In conversation, he can draw connections between early-1990s hip-hop and the Franco-Prussian War without taking a breath. Gettleson and I vibed that night, and over the next couple of years I’d see him at various political gatherings in America or Britain.

The Nanny State Made Me: A Story of Britain and How to Save It
by Stuart Maconie
Published 5 Mar 2020

There’s a lovely picture of the band Buzzcocks in their central library in Manchester standing in front of a section marked ‘Fiction / Romance’, which devotees will know became the title of one of their finest early songs. Strolling the shelves here in Thimblemill throws up all kinds of philosophical questions and juxtapositions: ‘Sport / Poetry’; ‘True Crime / Maths’; ‘Science / Religion’. A picture of Stephen Fry beams down from above (as in the wall above, not heaven) and bears one of his many quotable bon mots. ‘An original idea. That can’t be too hard. The library must be full of them.’ Thimblemill is packed with them and they’re just in the pages of the books or the hard drives of the laptops. Smethwick Library has Julie McKirdy too.

The Coming Wave: Technology, Power, and the Twenty-First Century's Greatest Dilemma
by Mustafa Suleyman
Published 4 Sep 2023

—Jason Matheny, CEO of RAND, former assistant director of national intelligence, former director of IARPA “If you want to understand the meaning, promise, and threat of the coming tidal wave of transformative technologies that are even now swelling and converging out there on the main, then this deeply rewarding and consistently astonishing book by Mustafa Suleyman, one of the key pioneers of artificial intelligence, is an absolutely essential read.” —Stephen Fry, actor, broadcaster, and bestselling author “This important book is a vivid wake-up call. It carefully outlines the threats and opportunities associated with the exhilarating scientific advances of recent years. The Coming Wave is rich with interesting facts, arresting arguments, and compelling observations; it is essential reading.”

Humankind: A Hopeful History
by Rutger Bregman
Published 1 Jun 2020

More praise for Humankind ‘An extraordinarily powerful declaration of faith in the innate goodness and natural decency of human beings. Never dewy-eyed, wistful or naive, Rutger Bregman makes a wholly robust and convincing case for believing – despite so much apparent evidence to the contrary – that we are not the savage, irredeemably greedy, violent and rapacious species we can be led into thinking ourselves to be’ Stephen Fry ‘Every revolution in human affairs – and we’re in one right now! – comes in tandem with a new understanding of what we mean by the word “human”. Rutger Bregman has succeeded in reawakening that conversation by articulating a kinder view of humanity (with better science behind it). This book gives us some real hope for the future’ Brian Eno ‘Humankind provides the philosophical and historical backbone to give us the confidence to collaborate, be kind and trust each other to build a better society’ Mariana Mazzucato, author of The Value of Everything ‘Some books challenge our ideas.

The Lie of the Land
by Amanda Craig
Published 14 Jun 2017

Xan barely knows how to put a wash in a washing machine, he’s never used a Dyson. London is trickling away. Cars, road, supermarkets, churches, houses, cars, road, trees, road, hills, more and more of them, occasionally dotted with sheep or cows. This is all vaguely, drearily familiar. Beside him, Rosie wriggles, and over the unctuous tones of Stephen Fry reading another Harry Potter audiobook he can hear the inevitable complaint about needing the toilet. ‘Hang on, sweetheart.’ They pull over at a service station just before Bristol. Xan is left with Quentin, who sips the coffee he has bought for himself. ‘Disgusting,’ he says. ‘Now I know why Socrates preferred death to exile.

Lost Connections: Uncovering the Real Causes of Depression – and the Unexpected Solutions
by Johann Hari
Published 1 Jan 2018

Everyone at Kotti, the ongoing protest in Berlin, was amazing: I particularly thank Matthias Clausen, who helped me so much. Jim Cates gave me a lot of his time and insight when he took me to an Amish community in Indiana (and showed me the world’s greatest manhole). Kate McNaughton gave me a place to stay—and her wisdom—in Berlin, and Jacinta Nandi filled me with joy, as she always does. Stephen Fry talked to me about E. M. Forster in Los Angeles and helped to clarify my thinking about connection. CarolLee Kidd transcribed my interviews: if you need an excellent transcription service, e-mail her at carollee@clktranscription.com. In Denmark, Kim Norager helped me arrange interviews. In Sydney, the Festival of Dangerous Ideas made it possible for me to interview lots of people, and I am also very grateful to Emanuel Stamatakis for suggestions regarding fact checking and scientific accuracy.

Posh Boys: How English Public Schools Ruin Britain
by Robert Verkaik
Published 14 Apr 2018

Basil Liddell Hart (St Paul’s) and Alan Clark (Eton) promoted the attack on British leadership by characterising it as ‘lions led by donkeys’. Later the TV series Blackadder Goes Forth – the ultimate parody of First World War public school attitudes – was created by Richard Curtis (Harrow), produced by John Lloyd (King’s Canterbury), and starred Rowan Atkinson (St Bees), Stephen Fry (Uppingham) and Hugh Laurie (Eton). Britain’s military future, as well as its history, is still being shaped by the First World War. The OTC model for the military training of schoolboys was invoked by the former defence secretary Michael Fallon (a former pupil of Epsom College, site of one of the finest rifle shooting clubs in the country) in 2016 in his plan to extend the public school-dominated cadet corps to more state schools.

A Classless Society: Britain in the 1990s
by Alwyn W. Turner
Published 4 Sep 2013

An on-air apology for Clary’s comments was subsequently broadcast and the comedian found television work hard to come by over the next few years. John Junor, the great Fleet Street veteran of outraged morality, was one of many keen to express his indignation, but also noted in his Mail on Sunday column the presence of Stephen Fry on television and Channel 4’s alternative Queen’s speech on Christmas Day, due to be delivered by the venerable Quentin Crisp. ‘Aren’t the gays taking over our culture?’ he wondered. Though as Clary observed, fisting wasn’t restricted to homosexuals: ‘It’s an activity open to anyone lucky enough to be born with a hand and an arsehole.’

…

A black studio guest would be captioned as ‘Representing every single black person in Britain’, and Morris would turn portentously to the camera after a film report to announce: ‘The situation is clearly grave enough to merit a black-and-white freeze frame.’ Much of the best television comedy of the decade was similarly rooted in playing with the medium itself, from Drop the Dead Donkey and Stephen Fry’s investigative journalist in This Is David Lander, through Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer’s triumphant parody of a game show in Shooting Stars, to the obscure targets of some of The Fast Show’s best-known sketches: Country Matters, Jazz Club and Channel 9. Television was also at the heart of much of the era’s post-alternative stand-up.

Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs
by Johann Hari
Published 20 Jan 2015

I also thank many other people who read this book and commented on it in ways that made it better, or helped me in some other way: Patrick Strudwick, Jessica Smerin, Josepha Jacobson, Adam Thirlwell, Russell Brand, Lizzie Davidson, Noam Chomsky, Sarah Punshon, Daniel Bye, Tom Angell, Evgeny Lebedev, Ammie al-Whatey, Rachel Seifert, Glenn Greenwald, Arianna Huffington, Eugene Jarecki, Sarah Morrison, Jeremy Heimans, Alnoor Lahda, Ali Weiner, Jack Bootle, Alex Romain, Ronan McCrea, Matthew Bloch, Greg Sanderson, Josh Cullimore, Anna Powell-Smith, David Pearson, Dorothy Byrne, Rupert Everett, Peter Marshall, Chris Wilkinson, Owen Jones, Damon Barrett, Matthew Todd, Stephen Fry, Matt Getz, Deborah Orr, Sally-Ann Larson, Zoe Ross, Joss Garman, Ben Stewart, Anna Moschovakis, Dennis Hardman, Simon Wills, my parents, Violet and Eduard Hari, my brother and sister, Steven and Elisa, and my sister-in-law, Nicola. Harm Reduction International covered the costs of my trip to the World Federation Against Drugs convention in Stockholm, Sweden, in return for a short report on what I saw: thank you, Mike Trace, for facilitating this.

Ripe
by Nigel Slater
Published 9 Apr 2012

Put the empty pan immediately back on the stove and turn the heat down low, then add the cheese, cream, and reserved cooking water. Stir for a minute or less, until the cheese starts to melt and you have an impromptu sauce. Tip the pasta back into the pan with the walnuts and sage leaves, then tip onto warm plates. Vanilla walnut sundae It was Stephen Fry who I feel discovered the best possible use for this particular nut. On visiting a world-famous Vermont ice cream manufacturer, he was encouraged to come up with his own “flavor.” It was a stroke of typical Fry genius that led him to woo the assembled crew with a simple mixture of vanilla ice cream, bitter chocolate, and toasted walnuts.

Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All
by Michael Shellenberger
Published 28 Jun 2020

In the fall of that year, more than six thousand Extinction Rebellion activists blocked the five main bridges that cross the River Thames, which flows through London, preventing people from getting to work or home.1 The organization’s main spokesperson made alarming claims on national television. “Billions of people are going to die.” “Life on Earth is dying.” And, “Governments aren’t addressing it.”2 By 2019, Extinction Rebellion had attracted the support of leading celebrities, including actors Benedict Cumberbatch and Stephen Fry, pop stars Ellie Goulding and Thom Yorke, 2019 Oscar-winning actress Olivia Colman, Live Aid producer Bob Geldof, and Spice Girl Mel B. While Extinction Rebellion may not have been representative of all environmentalists, nearly half of Britons surveyed told pollsters they supported the group.3 And the British were not alone.

Becoming Steve Jobs: The Evolution of a Reckless Upstart Into a Visionary Leader
by Brent Schlender and Rick Tetzeli
Published 24 Mar 2015

The iPhone 4S had been introduced two days earlier, in the company’s first public event after Steve’s death, with presale orders that exceeded those of any previous model. The memorial service was an invitation-only event, and the guests ranged from his closest friends and family to the Clintons, Bono, Rahm Emanuel, Stephen Fry, Larry Page, Rupert Murdoch, and John Warnock, the Adobe cofounder. Bono and the Edge from U2 performed Steve’s favorite Dylan song, “Every Grain of Sand”; Joan Baez sang “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot”; and Mona Simpson read a moving tribute about Steve on his deathbed. Larry Ellison and Jony Ive also made remarks.

Track Changes
by Matthew G. Kirschenbaum
Published 1 May 2016

Simpson’s careful attention to Adams’s personal computing history (on which this paragraph is heavily dependent) is exemplary, and all too rare among literary biographers, many of whom are still content to simply use the generic terms “computers” and “word processors,” if they mention them at all. 88. Ibid., 185. 89. The most comprehensive study to date of interactive fiction is Nick Montfort, Twisty Little Passages: An Approach to Interactive Fiction (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003). 90. Simpson, Hitchhiker, 186. As Simpson notes, this claim is disputed by Stephen Fry, an actor and author. 91. Ibid., 185. 92. Indeed, tablets themselves already had a real-world corollary in Alan Kay’s ideas for a Dynabook. See Kay, A Personal Computer for Children of All Ages (Palo Alto, CA: Xerox PARC, 1972), http://www.mprove.de/diplom/gui/kay72.html, pdf. 93. See David B.

Small Men on the Wrong Side of History: The Decline, Fall and Unlikely Return of Conservatism
by Ed West
Published 19 Mar 2020

If you’re a conservative you are almost perennially annoyed by Radio 4 but, like me, you may have some sort of compulsive, news-junkie urge to listen to it even though you know it’s probably shortening your life. Until eventually you become just another boring, red-faced idiot shouting at Radio 4 – with the wife raising her eyes, thinking to herself, ‘Here he goes again.’ And yet the conflicting thing is that I love the BBC – I love the sound of David Attenborough and Stephen Fry, I love its high-mindedness, its comedy and its peerless documentary making. I like drinking wine in the kitchen while cooking, with Front Row playing, or the familiar figure of Gary Lineker sharing the nation’s dreams during another World Cup adventure. As a conservative I like institutions – they provide the warm feeling of oxytocin that reminds me I’m not alone in this world – but what happens when they become captured by the other side?

Free Speech: Ten Principles for a Connected World
by Timothy Garton Ash
Published 23 May 2016

24 He was convicted in the local Magistrates’ Court of sending a ‘menacing’ electronic message, was fined, and reportedly lost his job as a result. The Crown Court upheld the conviction on the grounds that Chambers was ‘at the very least aware that his message was of a menacing character’. Only more than two years after the original trial, and after prominent free speech advocates such as the actor Stephen Fry had ridden to his defence, did the High Court overthrow the conviction.25 Was a legal sanction justified in such a case? Absolutely not. Violence was neither likely nor intended, let alone imminent. This was a silly joke. At the very most, it deserved a verbal caution from the police, and a warning snort from Chambers’s friends would have sufficed.

Lonely Planet London City Guide
by Tom Masters , Steve Fallon and Vesna Maric
Published 31 Jan 2010

There are nine free 50-minute eyeOpener tours of individual galleries throughout the day, and 20-minute eyeOpener spotlight talks at 1.15pm focusing on different themes from the collection. Ninety-minute highlights tours (adult/concession £8/5) leave at 10.30am, 1pm and 3pm. If you want to go it alone, audioguide tours (£3.50) are available at the information desk, including a family-oriented one narrated by comedi-an, writer and TV presenter Stephen Fry. One specific to the Parthenon Sculptures (aka the Parthenon Marbles or Elgin Marbles) is available in that gallery. You could also check out Compass, a multimedia public access system with 50 computer terminals that lets you take a virtual tour of the museum, plan your own circuit or get information on specific exhibits.

Pauline Frommer's London: Spend Less, See More
by Jason Cochran
Published 5 Feb 2007

Among the best: Visit London’s “Live London Like a Local” and “London Area” guides (www.visitlondon.com/maps/podcasts); the Tate museums’ audio tours and interviews, including some for children (www.tate.org.uk/ podcasts); the leisurely Free Audio London Walks, by an enthusiast, an Anglican priest (http://londonwalks.libsyn.com or www.robert-wright. com); the tours of Sir John Soane’s Museum, which are introduced by actor Stephen Fry (www.soane.org/audio.html); a tour of the area around London and Tower bridges by a local improvement group (www.discover londonbridge.co.uk); the National Gallery’s video-enabled monthly podcast and its somewhat stuffy “Be Inspired Tour” of highlights (www.national gallery.org.uk/podcast); and Islington Council’s A1 Audio Tours of its neighborhoods (www.islington.gov.uk).

The Meritocracy Trap: How America's Foundational Myth Feeds Inequality, Dismantles the Middle Class, and Devours the Elite
by Daniel Markovits
Published 14 Sep 2019

Scott Campbell, the librarian at Brandeis Law School in Louisville, reports that Brandeis’s scholars and biographers have not found a source for the quote. See Ronald Smith, Thomas Ewing, Jr., Frontier Lawyer and Civil War General (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2008), 307 n.59. Chapter Four: The Working Rich “What, ‘work’?”: The precise lines are from Stephen Fry’s and Hugh Laurie’s television adaptation of Wodehouse’s story “Jeeves Takes Charge,” first published in the Saturday Evening Post, November 1916. See Jeeves and Wooster, “In Court After the Boat Race,” ITV, April 22, 1990, written by Clive Exton, directed by Robert Young. “a chicken in every pot”: The slogan is commonly attributed to Herbert Hoover’s 1928 presidential campaign, but it appears that Hoover himself never used it.

The Art of Community: Building the New Age of Participation
by Jono Bacon
Published 1 Aug 2009

These communities are becoming increasingly important to providers and never before have artists, musicians, producers, and politicians been so aware of their followers. The Internet has enabled fans to connect more easily with their heroes, and this has developed a kind of collaboration. There are many examples of this. Stephen Fry, a well-respected British actor, started using the Twitter microblogging service and within months he had 400,000 people following his updates. The Obama administration has made use of blogging and YouTube extensively to distribute content and invite feedback. One producer who has engaged repeatedly with his fan community is Joss Whedon, the Academy Award-nominated and Hugo Award-winning American writer, director, and executive producer of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

The Rough Guide to Brazil
by Rough Guides
Published 22 Sep 2018

Belô Veloso Belô Veloso Bezerra da Silva Se Não Fosse o Samba É Isso Aí o Homem Caetano Veloso Velô Estrangeiro Circuladô Vivo Fina Estampa Um Outro Som Caetano Veloso and Roberto Carlos A Música de Tom Jobim Carlinhos Brown Timbalada Cartola Cartola Céu Chico Buarque Ópera do Malandro Vida Para Todos Uma Palavra Daniela Mercury Daniela Dorival Caymmi A música de Caymmi Elís Regina and Tom Jobim Elís e Tom Fernanda Porto Fernanda Porto Gal Costa Aquarela do Brasil Gilberto Gil Parabolicamera Unplugged O Sol de Oslo Gilberto Gil and Caetano Veloso Tropicalia 2 João Gilberto Voz e Violão Jorge Ben Jor Acústico Ao Vivo Kid Abelha Acústico Luiz Gonzaga Maiores Sucessos Maria Bethânia Ambar Marisa Monte M Cor de Rosa e Carvão Barulhinho Bom Memórias, Crônicas e Declarações de Amor Universo Ao Meu Redor Milton Nascimento Clube da Esquina Paulinho da Viola Cantando Chorando Eu canto samba Bebado samba Seu Jorge Cru América Brasil Tim Maia In Concert Tom Jobim Wave Tribalistas Tribalistas Various Eu Tu Eles (film soundtrack) Velha Guarda da Mangueira E Convidados Zeca Baleiro Por onde andará Stephen Fry? Líricas MPB (Música Popular Brasileira) The number of high-quality singers and musicians in Brazilian music besides these leading figures is enormous, often grouped within the rather nebulous genre of MPB traditional Brazilian styles. Milton Nascimento has a talent that can only be compared with the founders of tropicalismo, with a remarkable soaring voice, a genius for composing stirring anthems and a passion for charting both the experience of blacks in Brazil and the traditions of his native Minas Gerais.