“... the country decided on a boycott, also their riposte in the late 1980s when Arizona baulked at the Martin Luther King holiday. After SB1070, a group of California truckers refused to work in the state, the mayor of San Francisco advised his employees to avoid visiting and by 2011, dozens of valuable conference bookings had been stood down. Money and contracts ...”

“... material. I think Duncan got fired or resigned. He clearly lost this battle of poetry v. the kitchen sink – of which I knew nothing until later. He was just a name on the notepaper as far as I was concerned. Anyway, that was the end of that. For a moment it did seem that they or he would have done it. Happily, they didn’t.Were you reading literary ...”

“... mystical value to the mere fact of being in opposition to society.’ The reviewer was the critic Martin Cooper, who had form in this area, having four years earlier decried Tchaikovsky’s later symphonies (previously found by major British critics to be masterly, impersonal and supremely inventive) as ‘hysterical … Quite unbalanced and, in the last ...”

“... seek button – derangingly – every two or three seconds. Burbly soft rock, stale oldies, Dean Martin singing Christmas carols, Mexican polka music, endless mirthless ads for Petco and Wal-Mart – the full auditory wasteland of American popular culture assailed us. Shades of when we used to be girlfriends. We bickered most of the rest of the way. By the ...”

“... a comfortable living.We met in his apartment in the building and sat on the deep soft sofas of his kitchen-sitting room, where he was batch-cooking a week’s worth of rice. He was amiable (except towards immigrants and Keir Starmer), articulate, discursive. He’d always argued about politics, he said, with his father, whom he clearly admired and looked up ...”

“... she took me instead. I stood outside South Africa House waiting, while she disappeared into St Martin-in-the-Fields. I hadn’t the faintest idea what she was doing and she didn’t tell me. I used it as a key scene in my novel, The Dream Mistress. I remember it very clearly. Even so, It was a jolt to hear it being confirmed by someone else. Confirmed, but ...”