Stephen Fry

He was immensely grateful for that.

And he'd burst his eardrum and his health had been appalling and dysentery and all that.

I mean, he was told by his lawyer that if he got the maximum sentence of two years at hard labour, which the Labouchere Amendment, which was the law he had transgressed, that he wouldn't be expected to survive.

People of our class are not expected to survive such a sentence.

I've had the pleasure of being shown around that prison by Sandy, in fact.

Hello, Sandy, if you're listening.

He's a terrific fellow and a wonderful guardian of the memory and a great understanding of the details of the appalling penal system.

I must say to myself that I ruined myself and that nobody, great or small, can be ruined except by his own hand.

I am quite ready to say so.

I'm trying to say so, though they may not think it at the present moment.

This pitiless indictment I bring without pity against myself.

Terrible as was what the world did to me, what I did to myself was far more terrible still.

I was a man who stood in symbolic relations to the art and culture of my age.

I had realised this for myself at the very dawn of my manhood and had forced my age to realise it afterwards.

Few men hold such a position in their own lifetime and have it so acknowledged.

It is usually discerned, if discerned at all, by the historian or the critic long after both the man and his age have passed away.

With me it was different.

I felt it myself and made others feel it.

Byron was a symbolic figure, but his relations were to the passion of his age and its weariness of passion.

Mine were to something more noble, more permanent, of more vital issue, of larger scope.