It is a sad fact that when people are really enjoying themselves and laughing immoderately, they can afterwards remember very little of the conversation, very few of the jokes. There was the famous occasion when Peter addressed a group of revellers at a lunch celebrating 25 years of Private Eye. Almost everyone who was there, myself included, will tell you it was the funniest, most brilliant speech they had ever heard. But ask us to recall the jokes and there will be a complete blank. Peter's funniest performances were generally of this impromptu, unscripted variety. ~ Richard Ingrams in The Observer (19 December 2004)

I'll leave with a story whose victim, Sir David Frost, won't mind it being told, because he tells it himself. David Frost rang Peter Cook up some years ago. 'P…

He got used early to the adulation of a wide public and eventually decided that he could do without it; long before the end, fame had to chase him far harder t…

Being British in this part of the century meant living in the country that had Peter Cook in it. There are wits and there are clowns in comedy, I suppose. Pete…

Some lie beneath the churchyard stone, And some before the speaker.

'Work, the what's-its-name of the thingummy and the thing-um-a-bob of the what d'you-call-it.'

The right honorable gentlemen is indebted to his memory for his jests, and to his imagination for his facts.