ARTS / Overheard

Politics is the enemy of the imagination.

Ian McEwan, Sunday Telegraph

People be sayin' 'We got Trevor McDonald, we got Moira Stewart, we got Daley Thompson,' I'm sayin' yeah, but what about our normal daily lives.

Sheila Ferguson of the Three

Degrees, on agreeing to star in

Hope and Gloria (ITV), The Voice

Is this light shining through my hair? Can't have that. Got to have it lit from the front or the game will be up.

Tom Jones to stagehands on his

TV show The Right Time, The Face

The world's first self-made albino.

Marcus Berkmann on Michael Jackson, The Spectator

There were great-great grandsons of Henry Irving, booming away in an extremely slow and sentimental fashion, Thirties actors who underplayed everything and were terribly charming; and youngsters who were trying to be Method and wanted to know who they were before they even knew what they were saying. The result was chaos.

Peter Hall on the RSC he inherited, The Observer