They say bad news come in threes

"Fiction is life with the dull bits left out."

"I still haven't forgiven CS Lewis for going on all those long walks with JRR Tolkien and failing to strangle him, thus to save us from hundreds of pages dripping with the wizardly wisdom of Gandalf and from the kind of movie in which Orlando Bloom defiantly flexes his delicate jaw at thousands of computer-generated orcs. In fact it would have been ever better if CS Lewis and JRR Tolkien could have strangled each other, so that we could also have been saved from the Chronicles of Narnia."

"It is almost better to be an impulse shirt-buyer than an impulse shoe-buyer. I have worn shirts that made people think I was a retired Mafia hit-man or a Yugoslavian sports convener from Split, but I have worn shoes that made people think I was insane."

"Common sense and a sense of humour are the same thing, moving at different speeds. A sense of humour is just common sense, dancing."

"Stop worrying - nobody gets out of this world alive."

Clive James (7th October 1939 – 24th November 2019)



"Since finding out what something is is largely a matter of discovering what it is like, the most impressive contribution to the growth of intelligibility has been made by the application of suggestive metaphors."

"What makes literature interesting is that it does not survive its translation. The characters in a novel are made out of the sentences. That's what their substance is."

"In some awful, strange, paradoxical way, atheists tend to take religion more seriously than the practitioners."

"I spend a lot of my time trying to draw the attention of actors to the minute and subtle details of human behaviour, which was the sort of thing I was looking at when I was a neurologist."

Sir Jonathan Wolfe Miller (21st July 1934 – 27th November 2019)

"As a Michelin star chef, Gary was remarkable, taking British cooking into the ascendant reconnecting us with a rich culinary culture to rival that of other nations. Classic cooking with flair and a twist of innovation was Gary’s speciality. As a good friend to all chefs, our respect for Gary was absolute and his popularity was universal. We never heard a bad word said about Gary and likewise, we never heard him utter a word against anyone. Gary will be sorely missed but his legacy will outlive us all.” - Restaurateurs the Roux Brothers.

"[At a] time when young chefs were making their mark in kitchens in country houses and hotels... wishing to upend our normally slavish relationship with French cookery and beat the drum for English ingredients and, sometimes, English dishes, Rhodes was one of the most successful, perhaps helped by an engaging personality and punkish appearance." - Food writer and gourmand Tom Jaine.

"We lost a fantastic chef today in Gary Rhodes. He was a chef who put British Cuisine on the map." - Chef Gordon Ramsay.

Gary Rhodes (22nd April 1960 – 26th November 2019)

RIP, all.

Great losses to our culture.