“... lunches Hitchens used to attend, along with people like Amis, Craig Raine, Mark Boxer, Julian Barnes and others. This seems mainly to have consisted of replacing regular words with slightly or much ruder ones: house becomes ‘sock’ (as it does in Amis’s genuinely funny novel Money), man becomes ‘cunt’ or ‘prong’. So you get A Cunt for All ...”

“... a time, she was ‘the most shoplifted female author in the world’. She bought places to live in Barnes, Islington, Brighton, East 12th Street in Greenwich Village: at one point she was paying for three homes at the same time. ‘Oh sure, we all look glam while travelling,’ she said to a friend, ‘we’re good at media images.’ But as she wrote in her ...”