“... since Jenny is virtuous and disciplinary, is itself a form of death to the restless ego. As Karl Miller pointed out in his LRB review (29 September), the novel involves love with death. It is because Amis’s novels have come more and more frontally to feature these inextricabilities, as of love with death, that any attempts to politicise them remain ...”

“... in the dramatic forms supplied by Tennessee Williams, Clifford Odets, Eugene O’Neill and Arthur Miller, Fugard found what he needed in Camus’s treatment of Algeria: ‘when I first encountered the articulation of that almost pagan, sensual life lived out in the sun, next to a sea, with warm rocks being, in a sense, the ultimate reality, it struck a ...”

“... goatee modelled on George Arliss’s Disraeli and had to be persuaded by his director, Jonathan Miller, to evolve in the succeeding weeks a characterisation based on his own face. No one seems to have told Holden that dress rehearsals normally complete, not commence, the rehearsal process. He will surprise many who worked with Tyrone Guthrie by describing ...”

“... to remember that Wilson also befriended and distributed titles to men like Alun Chal-font, Eric Miller and Jimmy Goldsmith, and that he seems, indeed, to have been a very poor judge of character in those who flattered his ego. As for the 19 trips to Moscow, Wilson was always prey to the hope that he could achieve an economic turn-around via a large increase ...”

“... branches in the Bettys chain) no longer does organic produce as they’ve changed their flour miller. ‘However,’ she assures me, ‘the flour is locally produced.’ As are, presumably, its pesticide residues. When I ask why the flour could not be locally produced and nevertheless be organic she cannot explain. Money is, I imagine, the short answer ...”

“... stage, I had been dragged in as a possible editor of this thing.I know they wanted to get Karl Miller at one point.But Karl had recommended me and for Karl’s sake I agreed to talk. It was thought I knew how to start magazines.Irony.Anyway, by then I’d been at the TLS, so I did know more about it than they did. I drew up endless documents about how this ...”

“... advertising arrived. It’s hard to convey the strangeness of programmatic advertising. As Carl Miller describes it in The Death of the Gods: The New Global Power Grab, ‘You do not buy space in a particular publication; you buy space in front of a particular kind of person, wherever they happen to go on the internet.’† Thanks to the Russian election ...”

“... consumer’. Paul Gascoigne was, Wilson says, ‘catnip’ to this demographic, citing Ian Hamilton’s writing in Granta and Karl Miller’s celebrated paean in the LRB (29 July 1990): ‘fierce and comic, formidable and vulnerable, urchin-like and waif-like, a strong head and torso with comparatively ...”

“... in their dealings with social services they were following the recommendations of a man called Ian Josephs, who is based in Monaco and who offers ‘free legal advice [on] forced adoption, secret family courts, British social services or social workers’. Josephs propounds a number of Golden Rules, including the recommendation that parents should refuse ...”