Does humour comes naturally to you or does it come from an ironic turn of mind?
What a question. I think if you strive for humour it would be hopeless. It is just my style. I am not aware of whether I am being funny or not being funny.
You started with parodies. You love American humorous writers.
Yes, that is true. The greatest parodist that ever lived was Max Beerbohm who was marvellously funny. I am a hopeless pastiche merchant. Maybe I do not have a style of my own. I just react to the latest thing I like.
For the first show I ever did on British Television, I was asked to name my favourite poets. I said, 'I will not do that. I will talk about arriving in America and loving journalism.'
I did this thing in the Mayfair Theatre in London where I read extracts from the writings of Benchley, Perelman, Thurber. They were mostly New York people. The greatest of American writers was Mark Twain. He was more or less a god.
One of the themes which runs through all of your broadcasts and writings is the difference between the English language as spoken on both sides of the Atlantic. This distinction has never ceased to intrigue you, has it?
That was the first special interest I took. I began to notice the differences. A lift was called an elevator. A biscuit was something quite different from an English biscuit.
In my second year at Harvard, I worked on a course called 'History of Spoken English in America'.
How did they know how people spoke in the 17th century? They know mainly from town meeting records. These were kept by doctors and lawyers and big men of the colony.
These men wrote a sort of phonetic script which was absolutely fascinating. For two or three years, it was almost my main interest.
An extraordinary thing is the sense of offence in Britain as American English creeps into the language over here.
A friend once said to me: 'I wish English men would speak English and Americans would speak American.' There is no way of making this division.
In 1740, a man named Mason referred to bank or bluff. He was surprised about the new words used to describe landscape. The most interesting work was on words and phrases that originated in the 17th century. It is a marvellous subject.
Yes, I cannot imagine life without music. I just had a feel for it as a boy. We had a piano. My brother learned to play it and learned music - which I thought was magical. I immediately started to pick out stuff for myself.
I had a feel for harmony and at some point when I had made the recording, 'This Evening at the Piano,' - which I did about 40 years ago - I decided to take lessons. My teacher was rather famous and terribly attractive. I was hopeless.
To this day a musical notation is really a bunch of house flies on telegraph poles. I have no idea what they mean.
I am deeply stupid about converting them into chords. However, I learnt entirely by ear and picked up classical music by composers such as pieces by Beethoven.
Then, of course, I got interested in jazz while I was in Cambridge.
Let us move on to politics.You have a particular view on mixing politics with friendship.
Well, very early on, after the war, I came to know James Reston, an influential reporter in America. We had seen what had happened to correspondents who had become buddies with politicians.
They could not write critically about them. We knew people who had been ruined. We made this vow: never become a close friend.
Over the years, you were one of those who were not in thrall of the Kennedy myth even at the time.
No, I regret to say I was not. There is a book coming out about a perilous position in which America is in today. In particular, it questions America's commitment to help other nations.
I quote the Kennedy sentence in his inaugural speech: 'We will defend any friend of liberty or make any sacrifice.' Vietnam was the price we paid for the Kennedy inaugural.
We had treaties with 43 nations. The Pentagon says we can manage two local wars and no more.
One of the striking moments of your entire career was that day in Los Angeles when Bobby Kennedy was killed. How did you come to be there? What were the circumstances?
Well, it was a freakish coincidence. I had gone to cover the California primaries. Bobby Kennedy was running.
I pushed through 2000 people and got into a tiny pressroom. I went into the pantry and - bang bang. It was an appalling occasion.
Let us talk about your television series concerning the history of the United States, America, and the book that followed. The series became the culmination of everything you have done there too. How important was this project to you?
Oh, I would say, if there is such a thing as a magnum opus, that was it. The work is what I am most proud of. I was asked, 'how long did this script take to write?
I said, 'I do not want to be coy but it took 40 years.' Since I arrived in America, I took an interest in the language and history. I drove around the country 16 times by myself. I was not trying to be cute.
A couple of years after that you were invited to address the joint Houses of Congress. This is a rare honour. How did that come about?
Well, the TV series, America, had been shown simultaneously in both countries. It was a great success in both countries.
A network took it over and showed it again in the spring and summer of 1973 as well as in 1974. I got an invitation from the speaker of the House:
`We are going to celebrate the 200th anniversary of the first Revolutionary Congress, the one that broke with Britain. It met on the 25th of September of 1774. We are going to have a ceremony in Congress, a band, a scholar speaking. We want to have a main speaker and will you be it?'
Golf does turn up in your talks from time to time. You are a self-confessed golf nut and you are completely beyond recall on the golf front and it does occasionally appear in the talks - let us be honest.
Well, it appears in the talks about once a year. Way back 20 -30 years ago, my daughter said, 'every time I listen to your talks you're talking about golf.' I resolved from then on that once a year would be the limit.
What about your own relationship with the BBC?
Well, I had always thought so until I heard from my biographer - a fellow called Nick Clarke.
He finds all kinds of possible eruptions that I had no notion about and they never happened to me.
There have been underground movements that were suppressed or something. I have enjoyed my experience. I do not remember any unpleasant times ever - neither strain nor stress.
What I did best was my own talk and I did that. For Steven Hirst, I did some history of American popular music and jazz programmes for about 12 years with Allan Owen. That was an extremely pleasant interlude.
You have kept going a form of broadcasting - a 15 minute talk - which was all the rage in the 1920s and 1930s. Is it difficult writing that sort of journalism compared to the newspaper journalism that you also did?
I realised early on - very early on - that writing for the Guardian meant that I could use whatever vocabulary was available to me.
However, when talking to a mass audience - people are listening in India, New Zealand - your vocabulary must be very much smaller. The effort to do that was fun and I worked on it and worked on it.
During the Second World War, when I really did not give much thought to the fact that a talk was a special way of writing, it was not just an essay read or a news piece.
I used to go into the BBC studio here in New York because there were many distinguished refugees, ambassadors, Andre Gide and W.H. Auden.
I thought, my God, these people are going to broadcast for the Resistance or for the BBC in Britain.
I thought that I had better go and learn. I sat there listening in the control room, and to my amazement, it was quite clear that not one of them had ever thought of broadcasting as a form of writing for talking.
They all wrote an essay or a lecture or a speech. It struck me: ' Oh my Goodness. This is something I can do here because it does not seem to have occurred to them.'
I took the issue up with serious writers. They did not care or know what I was talking about. They thought what you do is to sit down and write your normal stuff for your normal audience and then you read it.
Well, that is not it, of course. It is a special gift, something you have to work on. The syntax and the grammar go all over the place. You have to make it seem natural.
This is the great fun. More and more, I realise the enormous, marvellous flexibility and subtlety of the English language when it is simple.
John Donne is the perfect example of the man who said in his poetry the subtlest things in words of one syllable. That is my aim - to be able to write and talk like Saint Luke.
Much of your work has been concerned with Anglo-American relations. I know you do not believe in missions because you say missions are for bishops. Do you think things have changed or improved over this period? Have you helped at all?
I do not think so. I am always amazed to discover with very close friends that some of the original silly preconceptions on both sides, still exist.
I do not think I have been any help at all. I still think that it is a great privilege for anyone who knows both countries well to be able to watch two different kinds of human beings.