Alistair Cooke
Alistair Cooke
Alistair Cooke, KBEwas a British journalist, television personality and broadcaster. Outside his journalistic output, which included Letter from America and Alistair Cooke's America, he was well known in the United States as the host of PBS Masterpiece Theatre from 1971 to 1992. After holding the job for 22 years, and having worked in television for 42 years, Cooke retired in 1992, although he continued to present Letter from America until shortly before his death. He was the father of author...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionTV Show Host
Date of Birth20 November 1908
CountryUnited States of America
Curiosity is free-wheeling intelligence.
I believe Hollywood is the most effective and disastrous propaganda factory there has ever been in the history of human beings.
[In 1889] the last big tract of Indian land was declared open for settlement, in Oklahoma. The claimants and the speculators mounted their horses and lined up like trotters waiting for a starting gun. The itchy ones jumped the gun and were ever after known as Sooners-and Oklahoma was thereafter called the Sooner State.
I prefer radio to TV because the pictures are better.
If computers take over, it will serve us right.
But afterall it's not the winning that matters, is it? Or is it? It'sto coinawordtheamenitiesthatcount: thesmell of the dandelions, the puff of the pipe, the click of the bat, the rain on the neck, the chill down the spine, the slow, exquisite coming on of sunset and dinner and rheumatism.
Between a quarter and a third of Los Angeless land area is now monopolized by the automobile and its needs-by freeways, highways, garages, gas stations, car lots, parking lots. And all of it is blanketed with anonymity and foul air.
Golf is an open exhibition of overweening ambition, courage deflated by stupidity, skill soured by a whiff of arrogance.
Washington's birthday is as close to a secular Christmas as any Christian country dare come this side of blasphemy.
Every sport pretends to a literature, but people don't believe it of any other sport but their own.
No myth dies harder, and none is more regularly debunked by the facts, than the one about international sports contributing to international friendship.
The South is one of those kingdoms of the mind, like India or Scotland, that are neat and understandable only to people who have never been there.
So the British, of all ages, still walk the course. On trips to Florida or the American desert, they still marvel, or shudder, at the fleets of electric carts going off in the morning like the first assault wave at the Battle of El Alamein. It is unlikely, for some time, that a Briton will come across in his native land such a scorecard as Henry Longhurst rescued from a California club and cherished till the day he died. The last on its list of local rules printed the firm warning "A Player on Foot Has No Standing on the Course."
It used to be said that you had to know what was happening in America because it gave us a glimpse of our future. Today, the rest of America, and after that Europe, had better heed what happens in California, for it already reveals the type of civilisation that is in store for all of us.