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“... Timney, husband and parliamentary aide to the home secretary. On the London Review blog last month Jenny Diski wrote that for the MPs involved, the expenses scandal is ‘like being a grown-up caught picking your nose and eating it’. For Jacqui Smith, it was more a case of the entire country walking in on her husband having a wank. Then there’s Dennis ...”

“... in memoriam Jenny Diski 1947-2016 Pale duty stamps about in plenty of nothing         like the night when you knew everything to time when each step was beaten off when the rack might add         more glory and I would watch the stars not kin nor proof to rule the sphere to know         by clothes and tea how to cut them out of lino Now see who has the little boat of love and wave         adrift more salt at its best splash scornful enough away on your right to curve well in some hope then         plunge like blame, a hat tossed up and gone and lost wires humming if ever there was one at hand         always apt to walk with me out of my mind’s eye Old china caught to hold as springless nature seeps up         and wells and brims and falls back again in a forest of beasts where silent stories reach an end         or in dark lists above the clause that starts to die left to review by me my kindest cut scabbed as a free         local disguise made naked to suffer for doing just that You could give it up for hope’s always a bit of web to ignore         bound into the relief wire bad as you wish for this lack of a figure in the grip of method on the screen         to burst out of acid to be like last at the spindle instant as a gripping vertigo flash vacuum leaves spores in place         of humanism for us when this frolic unveils payment End a hard time to get enough pink forms to reconcile         two worlds of the mind to say the least and work safe hands on what we know to move abroad like autumn         leaves the trees revealed at last as a mouthpiece for language a copy to taste such stress detail at times of less art chat tangled         to a dead tune in sharp clothes in a space of her own Make one pall as another hand leaves another letter fail to         earth what it says out walking on skin debris from two true stories in matters as if we lavish its fine tip on lungs of art         to put a stop to this tread or peg out between ruts in thin sheen as that eye that glass jar screwed cold and dark in pots         too out all the same with a stump eyed from the window After midnight it was a baffle or a very good copy in some style         stapled deep with a mist full of blood for free detritus flooding slides in capital sequence to watch them drive stout posts         bleak to look at into the dark ground the black lightless fen all about the aims of the whole bound in like a literary theory         snarled in rough cuts to earn a living to repudiate The hoover fades beneath a lethal march off this page         to another partiality from the air against his masks to form him now in terror forays or shape him in dumps         in flame run half afraid on a floor of damp glass a lip at fault speaking idle threads down to the bona fide dress         shirt in hand over fist spooning into his face So would you care to remain here and be consumed         round the neck as the only way downward like a load of light verse enduring through barrage and fancy filaments         twittering in the ceanothus of invention parcels the air bent into aesthetic shapes of this mercy or that or broken         right apart eaten away starved crushed old mad blind and stamped on Late level force embraces anybody it’s true and I must agree         with you out of my hands to where the cities are power splashed out in a witless sense, a complex merit or class say         or ever becoming a kind of work out loud burning it from one end to the other just because of skin declaring decay         that might be a view from nowhere but a day in the country What was made by us is hanging about covered in ribbons and birdshit         and aprons all set on this time of night for any other way through tangles of a seedy mind to hold nothing touched or even true         to the same life just a door step away from a sheepish mouth munching a sliver of something carmine and ludicrously         pastoral as fishpaste or cracks full of dust or an entire bowl Don’t nod or scramble so ruefully for dupes or lying for the poor         furtive moon-blush army come back to try the view a lone odour of almonds: am here am you we’re a monstrous pair of crows         doubting summer’s purchase a blush in a garden of gleams sowing seeds by the ankle path to sow wind in the tender cedar         a charm above the door dilapidated its charm raddled And see off a dumb tally over a long night’s counting till the sun         gilds the new and sole account crowned legendary and lost a film a few saw sheepishly on a blank promise to be better after it         slipped inside to do as we go into the barrier; a face opens the book of wishes and glides illegible as badgers in a complex pattern         buries a bad label a gesture or tab scrawl I’d like to escape from Oh secure fluid relief at your age one exists or leaves and will         dissolve by final flux over you unaided inflicted and not once more be ever one we hear so much and weep at windows in lost sentences         ignored in the rest ...”

“... its new freedoms. I have a friend who says the 1960s was like ‘someone turning the lights on’. Jenny Diski, a stalwart of this parish, has written, in her excellent book The Sixties, as good an account of that decade’s famous permissiveness as we are likely to get. ‘The permission we gave ourselves,’ she writes, ‘was more like a set of orders ...”

“... suggests that he needs to be rescued from the view he gave of himself in his diaries. From what Jenny Diski wrote about them in these pages† it seems clear that if the frocks are to justify the life they had better be good.The carapace/shift balance in English fashion tipped at the beginning of his glory years. The time for dresses with very short ...”

“... Queens and went in search of my bag. Some people took these things much more seriously than I did. Jenny Diski, late of this parish, once gave me one of her novels in manuscript and asked me to tell her what I thought. I was moving flats at the time, and the printout was in one of the boxes and I couldn’t say which one. I called ...”

“... ennui when we have old-fashioned boredom?In a subtle piece for this paper (15 December 2005), Jenny Diski answered the question by looking into English uses of ‘je ne sais quoi’: ‘a public phrase for the mannered’, as she called it. The English language isn’t keen on the ineffable – in his book on translation David Bellos memorably says ...”

“... your life.Hill was mute for a period in her twenties, and spent time in psychiatric care (she and Jenny Diski were inpatients together at the Maudsley Hospital in the 1960s). In an exchange of letters with Julia Copus, published in Poetry London earlier this year, Hill noted her tendency, when drafting, to ‘loosen, loosen, loosen’ and then ...”

“... no less) gaping ‘like a ripe cunt’? As it happens, over-ripe vaginas figure prominently in Jenny Diski’s Happily Ever After. Its subject – geriatric sex, viscerally described – is not one which has traditionally held out much appeal to the British comic muse. Daphne, ‘a 68-year-old ex-lady novelist’, conceives an irresistible crush for ...”

“... year – its third ever title – by And Other Stories, the clever new British independent that Jenny Diski wrote about in the LRB in January, and became one of the fiction hits of the summer after its surprise inclusion on the Booker longlist in July. The mass-market paperback has been copublished by And Other Stories and Faber, in time for its ...”

“... literal connection I remember between a cover and the content was in an issue with the piece by Jenny Diski that eventually became her book Skating to Antarctica: Peter did a wonderful painting of the moon in its successive movements, rising and falling over a polar landscape. That may have been a pure coincidence (nobody can remember) and in any case ...”

“... van and driven off, I received an email from someone I didn’t know, in Sweden. When my wife Jenny Diski was alive she used to write a monthly column for a Swedish newspaper, the Göteborgs-Posten, and one of the pieces had been about me and my books and where they’d all go when eventually I retired. My correspondent had, it seemed, been worrying ...”

“... History of the Silhouette’), an unexpected exhibition about underwear in Paris two years ago (Jenny Diski wrote about it in the LRB of 10 October 2013), there was a room where you could try on bustles and lobster tails and panniers and waist cinchers and other cunning elements of the dressmaker’s art made to press the body into different shapes. It ...”

“... In Remake it’s this wise child she celebrates, and indeed she mischievously cites – from Jenny Diski writing in the London Review of Books, as it happens – a witty mock-theory about the ‘crucial years of an individual’s psychological development not being from birth till five, but between the ages of 42 and 47’. The psyche and ...”

“... love of or care for animals or nature or life in general. It doesn’t work, for one thing, as Jenny Diski noted in What I Don’t Know about Animals (2010). People need to eat, and even Elizabeth Costello carried a leather handbag, and anyway, veggiebragging is boring and self-obsessed. Worse than that, it’s sentimental – like pro-Life-ism, with ...”

“... it takes the form of anxiety about death, questions over life’s purpose, or mental anguish (what Jenny Diski called ‘being intolerable to oneself’ in the LRB of 6 February), existential pain has been shown in clinical studies to reinforce and worsen the perception of ‘physical’ pain. Doctors may be undertreating physical pain, but they are ...”