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“... more and more grotesquely for the rest of both their lives.You can read the next instalment of Jenny Diski's memoir here (and the first one ...”

“... her more – by having had affairs with who knows who at the Football Association and telling all, Jenny Amner sent an email, which was eventually forwarded to millions of computers across the world, from her lawyer boss asking for £4 to dry-clean his trousers, over which she had spilt some ketchup. Her reply suggests that something is stirring in the world ...”

“... You may have missed out on love, transcendental oneness with the Universe, the adrenaline rush of the warrior, but you’ve had a headache or a bad back. Pain is the one engulfing, undeniable, incommunicable experience we’ve all had. And yet for all its ubiquity, pain is a solitary encounter, a lonely way of discovering the certainty that you exist ...”

“... Above all else we are concerned, in whatever form we let it take us, with memory. The idea of memory enables us to believe we can grasp the vanished past, historical or personal, and restructure its moments into a pattern that will give us in our continuing present, and them in the future, a coherent narrative of the time we have spent here. What else have we to console us for the blank extinction of all things before the beginning and after the end? Memory as order and record is all we’ve got to stand against the monstrous fact of non-existence ...”

“... The thought came to Ellen in the middle of one night. First she was asleep and then she was awake with a single question in her head, as if it was asking itself so urgently it couldn’t wait until morning to have itself thought about. The question was this: does Mount Rushmore exist? And then, in answer to her weary: Well, of course it exists; a supplementary question: How do you know? Got her! That was the end of the night’s sleep ...”

“... With New Year (anxiety of New Years past, dread of New Years future) breathing hot down my neck, and time itself moving along so fast that it seems to be about to lap me, Oxford University Press has produced a dictionary of two thousand new words.* I haven’t learned all the old ones yet. It’s very stressful. There ought to be a word for that second-half-of-life sense of time accelerating out of one’s orbit ...”

“... In spite of the V&A’s Versace festival, and books like Fashion Statements: Archaeology of Elegance 1980-2000,* I’ve never been convinced by the idea of fashion as art. I don’t see why it has to be; it has so much else to do. When culture and art swan up and down the catwalk bedecked in ‘fashion’, I find myself scrummaging around in the oversized wardrobe in the spare room at the back of my mind, thinking about my lifelong romance with what I can’t help calling ‘clothes ...”

“... For many women in the 1970s, the response to the exhortation ‘Know thyself’ took the form of specula, hand mirrors, torches and a group of comrades who would angle the looking glass and beam just right so that, reclining on your elbows, you could look down through your bent legs and see what really lay between them. It was considered to be an essential encounter with the centre of your being ...”

“... Almost everything I’ve ever done has very rapidly become normal. It’s the way human beings tend. ‘Adaptation’, they call it. Once I lived with a heroin addict in a kitchen. Every morning he went out for the day to score, kissing me on the cheek, and I pulled the candlewick bedspread – gold – over the mattress opposite the cooker. I washed his used syringe in the sink, squirting out the blood left in the barrel, getting it nice and clean ...”

“... Christine Keeler votes Conservative. She would, wouldn’t she? Having seen off the Macmillan Government in the 1960s, exposed the squalid underbelly of upper-class public life and fired the starting pistol to begin the sexual revolution by revealing that ‘You’ve never had it so good’ was actually ‘You’ve never had it so often,’ she reckons she knows what’s what about the world of politics and power (though sex and men are not really her thing ...”

“... her: She spat out ‘My Way’ with a new ferocity over a racing hand-drum pulse, and ‘Pirate Jenny’, one of her most spine-tingling interpretations, with an edge that rolled back the years. She then progressed to the front of the stage, smile slowly spreading in elation. ‘Since you’re all standing,’ she said. ‘I’d like you to join me in ...”

“... her death a surprise except to the few who knew. So Clive James (announced May 2011 – ?) and Diski (announced 11 September 2014 – ?) still battle it out for third place. In the other kind of race, last man standing, James and Diski would be meandering towards first and second place, Sacks and Mankell having already ...”

“... been. I whisper it to myself, like a mantra, or a lullaby.You can read the next instalment of Jenny Diski's memoir here (and the first one ...”

“... I’m nine years old, in bed, in the dark. The detail in the room is perfectly clear. I am lying on my back. I have a greeny-gold quilted eiderdown covering me. I have just calculated that I will be 50 years old in 1997. ‘Fifty’ and ‘1997’ don’t mean a thing to me, aside from being an answer to an arithmetic question I set myself. I try it differently ...”

“... such advice, she gives no guidelines, and I could more easily be Gretchen than fathom how to ‘Be Jenny’. If I thought I knew that, I probably wouldn’t have the doubt-space in my head to enable me to consider myself unhappy in the first place. Some of her commandments are more clear-cut than others, but that’s true too of the more modest ten that Moses ...”