“... It would be nice, wouldn’t it, a sort of comfort in a morally confusing world, to find some sweeping generalisation we could all agree to, regardless of history, culture or class? Only a brave and doubtless partially informed person would claim definitively to have found anything which all humanity has in common beyond microbiology. Try a life without love being meaningless, the need for the individual to have control of the means of production, or the ubiquitous appeal of the smell of frying onions, and there will always be someone ready to show that these truths are not universal ...”

“... There are some questions that are so urgent that they have to be asked repeatedly, even though there has never been, nor ever will be an answer. They may be addressed to another person, but it is just as likely that they are spoken aloud to an empty chair when no one else is present. Certain questions have to be articulated, made real and sent off pulsing into the ether ...”

“... We are moved but not overwrought at the fate of those who died at Pompeii, with the sinking of the Mary Rose, during the San Francisco earthquake and at the collapse of the Tay Bridge. We respond much more uneasily to the sinking of the Herald of Free Enterprise, the Estonia and the Marchioness. Lives cut short are less poignant once, to paraphrase Beckett, they would have died anyway ...”

“... Ossie Clark, for those who never hankered after his confections in the late Sixties and early Seventies, was a dress designer. His designs are in museums of fashion quite as legitimately as a gold necklace from ancient Egypt is displayed in the British Museum, or the uniform of the Light Brigade is illustrated in the Imperial War Museum. Each item tells us something about its time and place, certainly not everything, but something ...”

“... Most religions suggest that we get at least one other go at being. Christianity offers an afterlife, Judaism suggests an altogether better existence once the Messiah arrives, while Hinduism and other Eastern religions try to deal with samsara, the terrible burden of having to do life over and over again until you get it right. But I don’t think any of them offer much help with the alarming notion of multiple worlds, which quantum theorists have arithmeticked to prove entirely possible ...”

“... Doris. She gave me a copy of the novel, as she did every one she wrote. It was inscribed ‘To Jenny love Doris 25/11/74’. It made familiar and disturbing reading. I could see Emily in me, just as I could see my elderly neighbour’s description of me aged three. It is as accurate a reading of me as Emily’s harsh commentary on others. It is true, but ...”

“... brown and what seemed to me an astonishingly large rubber dome.You can read the next instalment of Jenny Diski's memoir here (and the first one ...”

“... left alone to figure out how we were to get on with each other.You can read the next instalment of Jenny Diski's memoir here (and the first one ...”

“... I recently received an email headed ‘Literature and Madness Network’ inviting me to the ‘1st Seminar of the Madness and Literature Network’, which is to culminate in the ‘1st International Conference in Health Humanities’ in 2010. Leave aside the use of the word ‘network’, and the mystery of ‘Health Humanities’: at least the upshot is a conference, which is something I can grasp ...”

“... Great shoemakers​ of our day: Manolo Blahnik, Jimmy Choo, Christian Louboutin. None of them, I think, very Jewish. And if there had been any great pre or postwar Jewish shoe mavins they would certainly have been pointed out to me by my parents, who identified any Jewish achiever in any sphere as one of the family: Alma Cogan, Einstein, Marx, boxing promoter Jack Solomons (the Sultan of Sock), it didn’t matter what they were known for, everyone counted ...”

“... When I was a student in the 1960s I wouldn’t shop in Sainsbury’s because they sold South African wine. After I married, my father-in-law in South Africa said: ‘You’ve got to live here before you can understand what Africans are like.’ I was shocked that anyone could talk about people like that. But I’ve grown to understand, now I’ve been living here ...”

“... In 2001, Armin Meiwes, a computer technician from Rotenburg in Germany, advertised on the Cannibal Café website for someone to have dinner with. He received numerous replies, but some withdrew when he responded and he considered others not serious enough. Eventually he invited Bernd Brandes for dinner. The plan was that Armin and Bernd would dine on Bernd’s severed penis, to be bitten off at the table for the occasion (this failed and it had to be cut off ...”

“... It was on Good Friday 1930 that listeners who tuned in to the BBC for the 6.30 evening news bulletin heard: ‘There is no news tonight.’ Piano music filled the hiatus before the next programme. In the same year the BBC’s Variety Programmes and Policy Guide for Writers and Producers stated: Programmes must at all costs be kept free of crudities ...”

“... Raymond Chandler writes in ‘The Simple Art of Murder’ (1950) that ‘the English may not always be the best writers in the world, but they are incomparably the best dull writers.’ He’s specifically referring to crime novelists – the likes of Dorothy L. Sayers, Ngaio Marsh, Margery Allingham, Agatha Christie – in an attempt to wrest the detective story away from the English suburbs and towards the grittier (and far more romantic) novels written by himself and Dashiell Hammett ...”

“... The penultimate time I asked the young man over the way in my narrow terraced street to close his window when he played his CDs, he replied that the legally permitted decibel level was 85 dB and that he was not above it, would I like to see the read-out on his player and, by the way, I should ‘get a life’. I suggested that these particular rabbit-warren streets needed a degree of awareness of others, and he said from his window that he couldn’t care less about the local community or the people in it ...”