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“... money together to bet on a horse and buy everyone a drink (I put 2/6d on a horse called Just Jenny and it won a whole afternoon’s drink for us). And when the pubs closed to give the ravaged inner organs of their customers a few hours’ rest, there was the Colony Club, also in Dean Street, with the proprietor and model for Francis Bacon, Muriel ...”

“... Oliver Sacks seeks for meaning in the chaos of neurological deficit. He has that in common with his patient Mr Thompson, one of two Korsakov amnesiacs described in The Man who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, who, says Sacks, ‘must seek meaning, make meaning, in a desperate way, continually inventing, throwing bridges of meaning over abysses of meaninglessness, the chaos that yawns continually beneath him ...”

“... The death of Dennis Potter may have been authored by God, but it was adapted for television by Potter himself. It began after a brief report in the Guardian suggested that Potter’s terminal cancer related to his lifelong addiction to nicotine. By return there was a gleeful letter from Potter revelling in the Potteresque fact that far from his ‘beloved cigarettes’ being the culprits, his forthcoming death from pancreatic cancer was probably iatrogenic: the result of years of lethal medication ...”

“... For a committed sedentary like myself, one of the most striking aspects of the populating of the town of Celebration, Florida, built by the Disney Corporation in the late 1990s, was the ease with which people made the decision to sell up and move there. In some cases, they crossed the continent, gave up substantial careers, took the kids out of school, put their property on the market, and signed a financial commitment to buy a plot of land on which not a single brick had been laid, in an alligator-infested swamp owned by a corporation which specialised in producing cartoons and simulations of historical and geographical clichés ...”

“... Doris stood behind the front door before opening it to me.You can read the next instalment of Jenny Diski's memoir here (and the first one ...”

“... Madness is a childish thing,’ Barbara Taylor writes in The Last Asylum, a memoir of her two decades as a mental patient. The book records her breakdown, her 21-year-long analysis, her periods as an inmate at Friern Mental Hospital in North London, and in addition provides a condensed history of the treatment of mental illness and the institutions associated with it ...”

“... The subtitle​ of Nikil Saval’s book is curiously inapt. Cubed is not a ‘secret history of the workplace’, but the not (entirely) secret history of a very particular kind of workplace. The main title is intended to pull that particular workplace into focus, I suppose, to narrow the vast number of possible workplaces down to a single square box (or latterly a three-walled lidless box) that will inevitably bring to mind the environment of the white-collar pen-pusher, although it has been a very long time since office workers reliably wore white collars or pushed pens to fulfil their duties ...”

“... One of​ the problems of ageing is knowing when to start complaining about being old. I received an email not long ago from a woman who had read something of mine in which I described myself, at 66, as old. She said she worked with elderly people and her 85-year-olds call people my age young. What’s more, they never refer to themselves as old. The point of my piece (written for a Swedish newspaper) was to report that I supposed I must accept that I was old because my hairdresser says, ‘Ah, bless,’ in response to whatever I say in answer to her questions ...”

“... Doris was​ in her early forties when I arrived in my vile mustard-coloured coat with a brown velvet collar, my first ‘grown-up’ item of clothing. It was hung in the airing cupboard alongside some marijuana that Doris had grown in the garden her first summer in the house and was now drying out. I never wore the coat again, though we did smoke the dope ...”

“... I’m​ Jenny Diski. You therefore aren’t,’ Jenny Diski said in a piece she’d been eager to write about a new edition of The Three Christs of Ypsilanti, a book – famous in its day – about three long-term asylum inmates each of whom believed he was Christ. We are who we are, Milton Rokeach, the book’s author, argued, because we know that by definition there can only be one of us ...”

“... Because, I suppose, pitifully minimal as it was, now there isn’t even a protest vote left. Jenny Diski If it succeeds, the Conservative-Liberal coalition risks dismantling the British wing of the alliance that brought about most of the great progressive achievements of the last century. Universal suffrage, the New Deal, the postwar European ...”

“... one of the people she’s split into) converses looking-glass style with an orang-utan called Jenny and three men who turn up in a boat, and are always demanding more to eat and drink and smoke – Marx, Freud and Darwin (again – he is, as we shall see, the real guru in the woodpile). As Jenny the orang-utan says to ...”

“... the Demoiselle de Gournay said to Montaigne, and in her new novel about their vexed relationship, Jenny Diski imagines the worst: Oh, Sir, from the moment I opened the first volume of the Essays I knew, just knew that I was in the presence of greatness. It was essential that we meet, such was the sympathy between our natures. We belong, twin minds, twin ...”

“... that they may have been written by a woman, a highly placed figure in the court of King Solomon. Jenny Diski’s latest novel is a third-person account of misadventure in Genesis: Only Human rattles through the lives of Adam, Cain and Noah and retells the story of Abraham and Sarah. But the omniscient third-person narrative is interrupted; the novel’s ...”

“... to pack Round Ireland with a Fridge by Tony Hawks. Antarctica? Take Skating to Antarctica by Jenny Diski. Auden, who liked to be contrary, had a theory that the best books for travelling with are those that have least to do with the place you’re travelling to. I’m staying put this summer. If I’m to believe Auden I should be reading In Siberia ...”