Alan Coren
Alan Coren
Alan Coren was an English humourist, writer and satirist who was well known as a regular panellist on the BBC radio quiz The News Quiz and a team captain on BBC television's Call My Bluff. Coren was also a journalist, and for nine years was the editor of Punch magazine...
NationalityBritish
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth27 June 1938
mean policy accidents
The Act of God designation on all insurance policies; which means, roughly, that you cannot be insured for the accidents that are most likely to happen to you.
historical vision magic
Disneyworld...is a historical reconstruction as sanitised as the Kremlin's, and a future vision as uncognisant of contemporary pointers as Peter Pan's. It is a magic carpet under which everything has been swept.
funny humor order
Since both its national products, snow and chocolate, melt, the cuckoo clock was invented solely in order to give tourists something solid to remember it by....
sweet flower passion
English Bohemianism is a curiously unluscious fruit. ... Inside this hothouse, huge lascivious orchids slide sensuously up the sweating windows, passion-flowers cross-pollinate in wild heliotrope abandon, lotuses writhe with poppies in the sweet warm beds, kumquats ripen, open and plop flatly to the floor-and outside, in a neat, trimly-hoed kitchen-garden, English bohemians sit in cold orderly rows, like carrots.
funny fall humor
The role of humour is to make people fall down and writhe on the Axminster, and that is the top and bottom of it.
hero men thinking
Sadly, as with so much about history's heroes, it's the spotting of potential fame that's the difficulty, whether it's publishing their poems, hanging their paintings, or buying their old underwear. Think of the great men whose lives passed in penury and hacking coughs due to public unawareness that their littlest possession would end up at Sothebys or the basement at Fort Knox.
useless today cigarette
The word "souvenir" has, of course, slightly extended itself in meaning until it now denotes almost anything either breakable or useless; but even today, ninety per cent of the items covered by the word are forgettable objects in which cigarettes can be left to go stale.
dog german-shepherds jacob
Jacob is a German Shepherd. (I have never understood why they aren't called German Sheepdogs. What do the Germans call shepherds?)
believe sweden way
Ethnically, the Germans are Teutonic...being made up of Vandals, Gepidae, and Goths, all of whom emigrated - south from Sweden in about 500 BC; why they emigrated is not exactly clear, but many scholars believe it was because they saw the way Sweden was going, i.e. neutral.
personality
Being a personality is not the same thing as having a personality.
simple discovery people
Can anything match that first fine discovery of the telephone and all it stood for? That first realization that, contained within ten simple digits, lay the infinitely possible? Out there ... lay six billion ears, all the people in the world available for contact and mystery and insult, unable to resist the beckoning of one small and villainous forefinger.
morning rough-day harder
A humorist tells himself every morning, "I hope it's going to be a rough day." When things are going well, it's much harder to make the right jokes.
should-have interesting people
Television is more interesting than people. If it were not we should have people standing in the corner of our room.
country delicacy bread
Malta is the only country in the world where the local delicacy is the bread.