“... a conspiracy to silence Carmen St Keeldare. A leaked transcript from Smith Square disguised as a Derek Raymond ‘Factory’ thriller. ‘Chapter by chapter – an embodiment, lock, stock and barrel, of the next Tory manifesto. Almost every sickly hypocritical promise and lie had been injected, like an infection, into the text of our book ... To make the ...”

“... in popular art: the studio artifices of pop music, for example, or the impossible sets and fourth wall breaking of the Hollywood musical. The ‘Dreamers, awake!’ mode rattles through mass culture over the decades: you find it in British television and pop music of the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. Penman says he first planned to write about Fassbinder four ...”

“... provide credos of fluent obscurity. Flaubert once said: ‘The more words there are on a gallery wall next to a picture, the worse the picture.’ Flaubert also said, in reply to a journalistic inquiry about his life, ‘I have no biography.’ The art is everything; its creator nothing. Freud, who used to read aloud to his girlfriends from Flaubert’s ...”

“... to be helping you write in secret. Why would I do that?’ ‘It might be good for fly on the wall,’ he said. ‘I’d like more fly on the wall in the book.’ He kept saying he’d done some work on the early draft but he couldn’t find it. That afternoon, as I laid out a second draft plan for the book, Julian ...”

“... kind of evil one can accept with a shrug’. If pushed, this apprentice warlock could also recite Derek and Clive’s ‘The Worst Job I Ever Had’ by heart and generally came on like a twisted forcefield of ego, will and fantastic put-on. It’s impossible to imagine someone like Bowie giving the media anything like this kind of insane access today ...”

“... Prodigal Bluestocking, as a bit feckless. A couple of years ago we went down to Dungeness to see Derek Jarman’s garden and ran into a man with his wife and mother-in-law whose car had got stuck in the wet shingle. Bridget had it hitched up in a trice and dragged it free, while the man stood by looking utterly flummoxed and outdone. (‘Ex-military,’ she ...”

“... then pop into his mouth with every appearance of relish. Maybe he did do that in public – the Derek and Clive dialogues with Peter Cook left very little to the imagination, so it’s not unlikely.23 March. Barry Cryer brings a good deal of old-fashioned joy into my life, as I’m sure he does for many others. His phone calls always begin, ‘It’s your ...”

“... best in terms of subsidy; few if any routes made a profit – while others went to the wall or made do with inferior vessels. So the government proposed instead to invite tenders for the Clyde and Hebridean ferry services as a single operational unit. To reassure Brussels that this wasn’t merely a trick to perpetuate the old order, it came up ...”

“... Pam, a cheerful woman Clive had known since childhood and who was now a producer at the BBC, and Derek, his long-time landlord. Eclectic would be the kindest word to describe it. Treacher, who had no reason to be kind, thought it looked a bit of a ragbag. First up was a well-known actress and star of a current sitcom who ascends the stairs of the lectern ...”