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“... that the writer veck started to platch like his life’s work was ruined’. The gangs in Kay Dick’s They (first published in 1977, fifteen years after Burgess’s novel) are no less brutal to anyone suspected of being creative. But unlike Alex, who’s eventually caught and sent to prison, they’re given a free hand: government policy is to ...”

“... interviews, one with Ivy Compton-Burnett and one with Stevie Smith, recorded and transcribed by Kay Dick in 1963 and 1970 respectively and published after the writers’ deaths. I’ve called them interviews, but actually they are conversations with friends: Dick knew both women well and the transcripts are ...”

“... In a long tape-recorded conversation she had with Kay Dick in November 1970 (the best source for the flavour of her speech), Stevie Smith remarked: I’m straightforward but I’m not simple ... In some ways I’m romantic but my basic root is profoundly sensible – profoundly sensible. About everything. There is a balance; I am aware of a balance ...”

“... she was driven to write because there was absolutely no company for her in Palmer’s Green. When Kay Dick interviewed her in 1970, Stevie complained about her photographs. ‘They make me look dead, and as if I’d been dead for a long time. I haven’t got a thing about age, but I do rather have a thing about looking dead and buried.’ She made no ...”

“... Her sense of what might have been was informed by what had already taken place. When the novelist Kay Dick asked her for a brief biography in 1953 (she seems to have been planning a piece on Smith), Smith replied: ‘It is precious dull I must say, unless we dip into fic. One might say for instance, Born in Afghanistan by accident on a picnic etc. But ...”

“... poetry – Fitzpatrick rubs shoulders with other crime novel heroines such as V.I. Warshawski and Kay Scarpetta. Yet the poetry industry – as well as poetic form – is crucial to The Monkey’s Mask, as observed by Fitzpatrick, who feels herself irreparably excluded on grounds of class, sexual orientation and lack of knowledge. The detective trail in the ...”

“... up ... People might dance a little ... A few games would begin ... When one day their friend Dick Wyndham slipped off a pogo-stick and broke his jaw, ‘there was a queer funeral cortege down to the river – to throw in not Dick Wyndham, but the pogo-stick.’ There were two tennis courts where mixed doubles were ...”

“... war,’ women say, ‘the troops because defending szszszsz among nations szszszsz owl-kay-duzz szszszsz.’ Sometimes Billy zones out entirely and there’s a sprinkling of words on white space: ‘currj’, ‘double y’im dees’, ‘Sod’m’, ‘Eye-rack’, ‘Eaaaar-rock’, ‘soooh-preeeeme sacrifice’ – the concrete poetry of ...”

“... he hated. He got through by learning to box, by falling in love with a boy he referred to as ‘Dick’ (actually called George Harcourt Vanden-Bempde-Johnstone, later 3rd Baron Derwent), and by joining a poetry society run by some charismatic masters. He said in his autobiography, Goodbye to All That, written in 1929 when he was only 34, that by the end of ...”

“... to excess – and gambled – not immoderately, but he was always careless about money. (His son Dick acquired the habit, ran up large debts in his Oxford years and even went down without a degree. However, he had another side and is remembered in the fifth of Edward Elgar’s ‘Enigma Variations’.) Arnold exhausted the patience of tutors, lounging back ...”

“... practice on the road, and she was Groucho’s unhappiest real-life casualty until his wives Ruth, Kay and Eden. His first marriage, to Ruth Johnson, took a long time to unravel. She had fallen in love with his quickness. Closer up, Groucho resembled his on-stage character in ways she found disturbing. He could say ‘I want to be alone,’ in a vaguely Slavic ...”

“... ever had a job, an omission I had to some extent rectified by the time I got to Kafka’s Dick, when the wife has at least been in employment at some period (she was an exnurse). But again the men did the jobs and most of the talking. In Enjoy, which is set in Leeds, the women do most of the talking, which is how it always used to be when I was a ...”

“... who has come in, as he has been told, ‘just for observation’. Presumptuous to call him Mr Kay, let us call him Mr Jay. ‘Fiction or non-fiction?’ asks Miss Venables. ‘Fiction,’ says Mr Jay, and hopes he is going to do better than last week. Last week he had wanted a copy of Jake’s Thing, but could not remember the title and had finished up ...”

“... that he’s a reincarnation of the original rags-to-riches hero out of Horatio Alger’s Ragged Dick; or, Street Life in New York with the Boot Blacks, a Gilded Age tale of pluck and the Protestant Ethic that lifts an urchin to respectability through a business career and churchgoing. In a 1990 interview Trump boasted to Playboy that ‘the working man ...”

“... of Mr Kernan, the man who falls, from that of his father to a neighbour of the Joyces’ called Dick Thornton, a tea-taster and opera lover. The story’s tone is unmerciful. The drinker’s clothes ‘were smeared with the filth and ooze of the floor on which he had lain, face downwards. His eyes were closed and he breathed with a grunting noise.’ The ...”