“... We could, as a homage to Derrida, go deep with this story of an immigrant, a wealthy man, a publisher and ‘cultural tycoon’ (Quartet Books, Women’s Press, the Literary Review, the Wire, the Oldie, chief executive of Asprey’s and, in 1993, voted Retail Personality of the Year), who employed an educated but intellectually insecure Scots woman, a translator with an academic husband and three children, to ghost novels, interviews, newspaper and magazine columns, love letters and ‘the occasional poem’ which he passed off as his own – but we won’t ...”

“... Stanley Milgram’s series of experiments to find out how far individuals would go to obey authority are legendary. Conducted in New Haven, Connecticut in 1961, they have been cited in manuals written by dog trainers (Bones Would Rain from the Sky by Suzanne Clothier: do not follow dog-experts blindly … instincts … humanity) and self-help pundits (The Necessary Disobedience by Maria Modig, dedicated to Milgram: empowerment … taking responsibility), as well as being the source for a Peter Gabriel song entitled ‘We Do What We’re Told (Milgram’s 37 ...”

“... In the membership roll of the worshipful guild of enabling wives, the name of Martha Freud ranks with the greatest: Mrs Noah, Mrs Darwin, Mrs Marx, Mrs Joyce, Mrs Nabokov, Mrs Clinton, and their honorary fellows, Mr Woolf and Mr Cookson. Wives, of either sex, are what keep the universe orderly and quiet enough for the great to think their thoughts, complete their travels, write their books and change the world ...”

“... In 1968 my next-door neighbour in our ward at the Maudsley Hospital for the psychologically bewildered or the just plain cross was a woman from Wales in her early twenties who had slowly been going blind since a gang of boys threw lime into her eyes when she was 15. She still saw light and shadow, so she knew if a person passed between her and the window at the end of her bed, but not who the person was ...”

“... What is the only place in England the joke went, where you can buy three cemeteries and a pint of beer and still have change from a pound? Answer: the London Borough of Westminster. Boom boom. This makes the price of a pint of beer in 1986 slightly less than 85p. The cemeteries, in Hanwell, East Finchley and Mill Hill, whose upkeep was the responsibility of the Highways and Works Committee of Westminster City Council, were sold by the council for 5p each ...”

“... Any mentally idle, story-hungry novelist or scriptwriter would do well to attend to the entangled and twisted lives of Friedrich and Elisabeth Nietzsche, which present ready-made a nearly perfect narrative. Most real lives need a good deal of cutting and pasting to get them into story shape. Here no complicated restructuring is required: you have only to start at the beginning and go on to the end (Friedrich’s ending before he ended; Elisabeth’s continuing long after her demise) and you have as rich a tale of human relations and mental worlds as any reader or viewer could stomach ...”

“... This is where we came in’ is one of those idioms, like ‘dialling’ a phone number, which has long since become unhooked from its original practice, but lives on in speech habits like a ghost that has forgotten the why of its haunting duties. The phrase is used now to indicate a tiresome, repetitive argument, a rant, a bore. But throughout my childhood in the 1950s and into the 1970s, it retained its full meaning: it was time to leave the cinema – although, exceptionally, you might decide to stay and see the movie all over again – because you’d seen the whole programme through ...”

“... I’m going to hang on to Keith Richards’s autobiography, because sometimes I worry that I lead a boring life and wonder if I shouldn’t try harder to have fun. When that happens, a quick flick through Keith’s memoirs will remind me that I’ve never really wanted to live the life of anyone else, not even a Rolling Stone. Or especially. I haven’t bought a Stones album since Sticky Fingers in 1971 and haven’t deliberately listened to anything they recorded after Exile on Main Street a year later ...”

“... Im not​ as fond of David Bowie as most people seem to be. I’m certainly not dancing a reel in the streets. Some good songs, an enviable capacity to shapeshift, but not so much charm, or humility, as some who nevertheless die young, younger, with children and grandchildren to leave. But that more than anything made me tear up during the tribute programmes ...”

“... I have to acknowledge (‘confess’ would be the more appropriate word) a misunderstanding. Only when I got her book did I realise that Liz Jones is not Samantha Brick. Scandalised Twitter links melded them together in my lazy mind as the same person (they write for the Daily Mail, everyone hates them, both women) in spite of the huge clue that one was called Liz Jones and the other Samantha Brick ...”

“... Those given to hasty judgments might find the title of Betty Maxwell’s autobiography something of a logical contradiction. Even leaving aside the strangeness, to feminist eyes, of the title’s construction, just a passing knowledge of the dynamics of Robert Maxwell’s ego would seem to preclude the possibility of having the one while being with the other for 47 years ...”

“... Although it’s counter-intuitive, neither sex nor the pursuit of self were inventions of the 20th century. In his snatch of vérité during the film Reds, Henry Miller hazarded the view that people have always done a lot of fucking. Montaigne settled to his solitary task of reflective self-examination in the mid-16th century. Sex and the self as subjects for investigation share the characteristic of always making their examiners feel like pioneers in uncharted territory ...”

“... Life, Piers Morgan says about being sacked in 2004 as editor of the Mirror, is as serious as you want it to be. Lighten up, he repeatedly tells sad celebrities who complain about his front page exposés that result in their unemployment or divorce. Take it easy, he emails spin doctors and government ministers who fear for their majorities after he has trashed their policies or their love lives to two million readers of the Mirror ...”

“... The several other people in the room hushed their conversation. ‘Well, it’s a good thing, Jenny, that there are some people still left who, unlike you, take sex seriously.’ Again, Doris hoisted herself up from the carpet in mid-sentence, and went to fetch another plate of biscuits. With increasing impatience over the years, Doris rejected the idea ...”

“... former passions together, neat and tight as a Rubik’s Cube.You can read the next instalment of Jenny Diski's memoir here (and the first one ...”