Jack Aubrey Is A Tremendous Tower Of

Prejudices Are Useless. Call Los Angeles Any Dirty Name You Like - Six Suburbs In Search Of A City, Paradise With A Lobotomy, Anything - But The Fact Remains That You Are Already Living In It Before You Get There

It Is A Good Rule In Life To Be Wary Of The Company Of People Who Think Of Themselves In The Third Person, No Matter How Well Justified They Might Seem To Be In Doing So.

The Repeat Run Of Fawlty Towers (bbc2) Drew Bigger Audiences Than Ever And Deservedly So. Statistical Surveys Reveal That Only The Television Critic Of The Spectator Is Incapable Of Seeing The Joke, Which Is That Basil Fawlty Has The Wrong Temperament To Be A Hotel Proprietor, Just As Some Other People Have The Wrong Temperament To Be Television Critics.

I Was Wrong, However, To Suppose That Sellers Thought The World Revolved Around Him. He Thought The Cosmos Did Too, And History, And The Fates... Like Every Egomaniac, He Behaved As If Everybody Else Spent Their Day Being As Interested In Him As He Was.

In The Movies First Impressions Are Everything. Or, To Put It Less Drastically, In The Movies There Are No Later Impressions Without A First Impression, Because You Will Have Stopped Watching. Sometimes A Critic Persuades You To Give An Unpromising-looking Movie A Chance, But The Movie Had Better Convey The Impression Pretty Quickly That The Critic Might Be Right.