Melvyn Bragg, Baron Bragg, FRSL, FRTS (born 6 October 1939) is an English author, broadcaster and media personality who, aside from his many literary endeavours, is perhaps most recognised for his work on The South Bank Show.Bragg is a prolific novelist and writer of non-fiction, and has written a number of television and film screenplays. Some of his early television work was in collaboration with Ken Russell, for whom he wrote the biographical dramas The Debussy Film (1965) and Isadora Duncan, the Biggest Dancer in the World (1967), as well as Russell's film about Tchaikovsky, The Music Lovers (1970). He is president of the National Academy of Writing. His 2008 novel, Remember Me is a largely autobiographical story.He is also a Vice President of the Friends of the British Library, a charity set up to provide funding support to the British Library.
He was born at 12:10am-BST.
He has served as a Labour peer in the House of Lords since 1998. He is also a close friend of former British Prime Minister Tony Blair , although he publicly opposed his governments legislation against fox hunting.
He studied Modern History at Wadham College, Oxford.
He is a great admirer of modern playwrights Harold Pinter , Samuel Beckett and Tom Stoppard.
He is a prolific and critically respected author. He won the WH Smith Literary Award 2000 for his acclaimed book The Soldiers Return.
He was named after Melvyn Douglas by his mother.
I will be a short-haired person from now on. I think my hair has,delighted the British public for long enough.
We need the BBC not only to celebrate and sanctify the past, we need it,to use the documentary form to look at and take risks with the present.
The arts stimulate imagination. They provoke thought. And then, having done that, all sorts of other things happen.
Dame Barbara Cartland was an endearing eccentric, and when I interviewed her, she wanted me to listen to her dictating to her secretary one of those romantic novels that she turned out fortnightly.
Magna Carta has become totemic. It is in the comedy of Tony Hancock, in the poetry of Kipling, never far from the front pages in a constitutional crisis. .
