Stephen Fry Would Like to Remind You That You Have No Free Will
Talk By David Marchese We all have them: cultural figures whom, beyond any single thing they’ve done, we’re just kind of glad to have around, and whose sensibility seems to jibe in some fundamental way with our own. I remember when Stephen Fry started to become such a figure for me. I was a teenage Anglophile, sitting at home on a slow afternoon this would have been the late ’90s and watching a rerun of the British sketch-comedy show “Whose Line Is It Anyway?” (Judge me not.) Fry appeared on the screen, a tall, urbane man with a zigzag nose. He was improvising a story in the style of John le Carré novels. “George,” he began, referring, I would understand later, to le Carré’s spymaster George Smiley and doing so in what I dimly inferred was a tone of upper-class officiousness. “Control’s gone potty, George. Operation Ascot went downhill, George, since the lamplighters and t