Alan Coren

Really sad news this time - the death of Alan Coren, England's finest humorist by many a mile. After Peter Cook gave up and died, Coren was surely the funniest man in Britain - a superb comic writer, whose style was forged by prodigiously wide reading and an equally prodigious intellect, but was always entirely natural, and often killingly funny. And he kept on being funny - always the hardest part - over four decades and more. I remember reading him in Punch before I was even into my teens and being dazzled and astonished that anyone was writing like this (no one else was, especially in Punch). Later I crossed his path a few times, but knew him mostly at second hand. Anyway, it would make no difference if I'd never known him at all - he was one of those vanishingly rare people of whom you can truly say that his death leaves the world a sadder and a slightly darker place.