“... emporium known as Needles and Pens, inevitably staffed by heavily tattooed, formerly middle-class young people with nose rings and huge (surely painful?) metal disks and Bantu bangles lodged in their earlobes. Despite this cluster of interrelated terms, I have to say that I think Dubuffet, originator of the art brut label, had the conceptual emphasis ...”

“... but it is safe to surmise that any admiration he felt would be quite severely qualified. So with Percy Lubbock’s The Craft of Fiction (1921), one of the books we who were undergraduates in the 1930s were persuaded to read. Lubbock was a disciple of James and a strong point-of-view man. Forster treats him fairly gently; he was a Kingsman and had been ...”

“... views were expressed, and, when it came to the last question, a dry, shrill voice, coming from a young man, rose to a peak: ‘I think Dad looks best stark naked.’ There were restrained cries of ‘Oh, yes, yes,’ and generous applause. As these words reached me, sitting at my desk and writing a partly confessional work, which I recognised at the time ...”