Melvyn Bragg
As the 20th century unspooled, a cultural warming melted down many frozen class characteristics.
In music, the Specials brought a city, Coventry, bombed out for a second time and riven with racism, to a celebration between black and white musicians and their music.
In the 1990s, from the estates of Scotland came the phenomenon of Irvine Welsh. 'Trainspotting' demanded its place not only in the high ranks of contemporary fiction but as a describer of a Britain that literally and metaphorically was in a deep mess.
We got a copy of the 'New Statesman' at my grammar school in Wigton, Cumbria, in the 1950s. It sat mint fresh every week on the library table, with two or three other bargain-offer magazines. The 'Statesman' came out of the unimaginable Great World. I started to read it then and have pegged along ever since.
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.
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.
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.
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?'
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.
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.
There is an army of the informed wanting to be more informed.
In 1997, the Labour government set out to strengthen funding for the arts - and achieved it.
Love of place is one of the characteristics I enjoy most about novelists.
Control, like curiosity, can be an exterminator.
I have written favourably in support of subsidy for the arts since the 1960s, and I continue to believe absolutely in subsidy, as I do in the BBC licence fee.
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.
In an arts programme, my job was to go where the talent was. And the talent was in popular culture.
I love writing, and I love making arts programmes.
Autobiographical fiction is very tricky.
A lot of the novels I admire are 'admirably provincial.'
I actually admire some of the books by a lot of the writers who write magic realism very much, but it's not for me. It's not what I can do, but even if I could, I don't really want to try.
A lot of the novels that I've really enjoyed in my life, whether it's Tolstoy's 'Cossacks,' or 'Sons and Lovers' or 'Jude the Obscure' or 'David Copperfield' or 'Herzog,' have an autobiographical spine.
Writers are looking for a story. Using your own life as the basis for a story gives it an association with reality that's a wonderful starting point.
More people go to Tate Modern than watch the Arsenal.
Film has changed the way we look at the past.
One of the great things about making 'Reel History' was meeting British people from all over the class system. It made me realise that London is a different country.
I sometimes think the only true record of England is the 'Cumberland News.'
The arts stimulate imagination. They provoke thought. And then, having done that, all sorts of other things happen.
Compared to the big 19th-century novelists, I've got a slim volume of work.
I enjoy writing. Would I rather be playing golf? No. Would I rather be fishing? No.
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.
There are two big beasts in the arts: the BBC and Sky Arts - challenging, leading the way.
I am 74 now. Looking back, I have a sense of not really being in control of my career. I just went where it took me.
I was the only BBC graduate trainee in 1961 interested in arts broadcasting. I knew I wanted to write, and I had to make a living.
Grime reminds me, if there is an echo, of sort of near enough like Liverpool in the very early Sixties. It's a lot of kids obsessed with music - obsessed with it.
Miliband failed us, his Labour supporters. And Labour will now, because of him, be in a disaster zone for a long time.
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.
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?
If you look at the creative economy in this country, it's per capita way bigger than any other in the world.
I got the job I wanted when I was 22, and I'm not going to give it up now.
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.
I'm a Labour party supporter, but I'm also a democrat.
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.
Few places on earth have been as affectionately alchemised into literature as the Lake District.
I'm a class mongrel.
My memory seems to be holding on quite well. There is no reason why it shouldn't if you keep training it.
The theatre always seems to be in trouble but always thriving. It's deeply comical to me that we agonize about our crap football teams and indifferent Test sides when in front of our noses is a great world success story that no one's interested in apart from those who work in it.
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.