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“... speeches than I would venture to do nowadays. But some of the diatribes I put into the mouth of George Oliver, a right-wing Labour MP, are echoes of the complaints more succinctly expressed by Dorothy in People, the complaints generally being about England. Enjoy (1980) is another play with which People has similarities, in that both, while ostensibly ...”

“... in steaming from his work in the fields, observed: “What an odalisque.” Bruce’s italics.’ George Melly is startled that Chatwin has never heard of the Muppets. Don McCullin, on a picture assignment for the Sunday Times magazine, rings at a grand house in Holland Park to find Chatwin standing behind the front door, ‘like Miss World’ – he ...”

“... her.’ Unawed, the couple make sophisticated table-talk about their fellow guests: ‘That’s George Melly. And there’s Lord Longford!’    ‘Not together? That would make the mind boggle.’    ‘No, at separate tables.’ It adds ‘sparkle’ to life, the narrator complacently observes, and ‘it can only happen in the ...”

“... Omnibus programmes, a sneering, superficial performance in which Gibson was only outdone by George Melly. That said, few would disagree with Gibson on Dalí’s shameful political volte-face. After 1933, with the Communist Party as reactionary as ever, it began to look as though the systematisation of confusion and the cleansing overthrow of the ...”

“... transgender prostitute, who claimed to have given every member of the royal family a blowjob’. George Melly or David Sylvester, good listeners and both regulars, might have tuned in a bit more carefully and given us the details. Muriel had many tousled Boswells, but her friends were generally too stocious – even by Boswell’s standards – to write ...”

“... to upper-class and purposively vulgar fanbase. In its ranks were Kingsley Amis, Philip Larkin and George Melly, who all later wrote of this time as of a lost Eden. Larkin’s jazz column for the Telegraph ran from 1961 to 1968, a period roughly coextensive with Mod’s quiet rise and noisy fall. Trads embraced a louche, boho scruffiness (silly ...”

“... collected by Saatchi), on established Turner-winning Brits like Richard Long and Gilbert and George, on old bugbears like Warhol and Richard Hamilton. Shortly before Fuller’s death, he thought the tide was turning: Serota seemed to be coming into line, even Saatchi was investing in the School of London. Then it turned right back. In his last completed ...”

“... wanker ye.’ I’ve never had this experience in England and have never missed it. Like George J. Watson in his wry and subtle autobiographical piece in The Rattle of the North I believe that English culture, though it’s often a lot less fun than the Irish, contains a core of calm and civility I can never reach, only admire – admire or ...”

“... got to be at Toggers or something. I hated all that. But I had a very nice housemaster – George Lyttelton of the dreaded Letters – who allowed me to educate myself. He thought it was rather amusing that I was reading Proust, though he didn’t think it was a frightfully good idea. I was always, as a child, fascinated by things considered unsuitable ...”