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“... Sue Townsend’s The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole aged 13¾ came out at much the same time as John Pocock’s The Diary of a London Schoolboy 1826-30, published by the Camden Society. John Pocock, 12¾, decisively a real person, was a builder’s son who lived on the edge of Kilburn, two miles out of London. In his journal, written on the empty pages of an old bankbook, he notes that on 23 May 1826 he walked to school: ‘Old Monk drinks like a fish ...”

“... Mo (who also writes for Boxing News), the poet Craig Raine (who doesn’t) and the playwright Sue Townsend of Adrian Mole fame. I had many misgivings about the trip, particularly in regard to creature comforts. I wondered, for instance, if the Russians had got round to mineral water. John Sturrock reassured me. ‘Haven’t you heard of ...”

“... Princess Tatiana Metternich (ho ho). He finds his jokes good enough to repeat, like the one about Sue Townsend: ‘creator of Adrian but no mole’. Confronted with such a merry madcap I see that I have no sense of humour at all, and am rather glad about it. On the other hand, in reading this book, I must be missing a lot of jokes. When Gordon speaks of ...”

“... Court politics was about personalities too. But Marie-Antoinette was a ‘fatal non-reader’, as Sue Townsend described Diana. No one had ever known her to finish a book. Perhaps, Thomas says, it was because she did not want to know the ending? If you are not armoured by the vicarious, by the pleasures and pains of imaginative experience, all that ...”

“... at the top of the Raikes near Wilsill in Nidderdale which I first saw aged six in 1940.11 April. Sue Townsend dies, whom I count as a friend both on the strength of what she has written and because we were both part of a group of writers on a courtesy visit to the USSR, as it then was, in 1988, a party which included Craig Raine, Paul Bailey and Timothy ...”

“... twenty years, according to the Public Lending Right statistics, the nation’s favourite reading. Sue Townsend said of Diana that she was ‘a fatal non-reader’. She didn’t know the end of her own story. She enjoyed only the romances of Barbara Cartland. I’m far too snobbish to have read one, but I assume they are stories in which a wedding takes ...”

“... coverage in this country was guided into unnoticed extinction. Back in 1975, Spens replaced Peter Townsend as editor of Studio International with Richard Cork. Townsend went on to found Art Monthly in 1976 with Jack and Nell Wendler. Under Townsend, James Faure-Walker had been a ...”