“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”