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“... It seems perfectly clear at first glance: beautiful and ugly are straightforward opposites. Beautiful Cinders, ugly sisters. Beauty, the Beast. Dorian, his portrait. So it’s not surprising, having commissioned Umberto Eco to write an essay and compile a book of pictures and quotations called On Beauty in 2004, that by 2007 the publishers thought it was time for On Ugliness ...”

“... As any adult can tell you – or any adult not given over entirely to mawkish and convenient notions of innocence – children are born spies. Every parent (previously an independent individual pursuing their own interests and desires) knows: a child arrives and it starts to watch you. You are never alone again, not really. There is someone who has arrived and will not go away; who not only watches you but also possesses their own consciousness, has views, puts two and two together and understands more or less than you want them to, but either way distorts the picture you have of your life ...”

“... There must be people who, during their lifetime, get their minds right enough not to feel bitterness as the end looms and they realise that nothing much else is going to happen to them apart from death. I understand from reading and anecdote that some people do die with a smile and the words ‘It’s been a good life’ on their lips. But not many, surely? It seems to me almost unreasonable, indecent even, not to feel some degree of regret as life winds down towards the end ...”

“... Autumn looms darkly and terrible in my life. From midsummer I start to worry, and by late August I am filled with dread. My arachnophobia has ensured that the autumnal mating urge which causes spiders to wander into our houses – confused by some sudden indefinable but compelling ache in the forefront of their small minds – in search of a nice warm dark corner to nest (don’t think about it), ushers in my personal annual festival of anxiety and horror ...”

“... Susan Sontag intended something like the book which is now published as At the Same Time to be her final collection of essays. After that, says her son, David Rieff, in his foreword, she intended to get on with what she most valued, writing fiction. Edited by her, somewhat differently no doubt, this would, then, have been her next book. As it is, published two years after her death, and put together by Rieff and her assistants with an eye on her preliminary sketch of its contents, it is her last book ...”

“... There’s a science-fiction short story, I can’t remember by whom, which has a New York journalist on a hiking tour, lost in the Appalachians. He comes across a ramshackle house lived in by a family of hillbillies and they give him a bed for the night. In the morning at breakfast he notices that one of the girls has her headscarf tied in a manner he’s never seen before – it’s strange but very elegant ...”

“... Initially I thought it no more than mildly interesting in a world full of more interesting events when I read that Roman Polanski had been imprisoned in Switzerland prior to being extradited to the US on a 30-year-old charge of rape. But, increasingly, in the news, on Facebook, Twitter, the LRB blog and in conversation, I’ve been reading the argument between those who think he should not have been arrested and those who think he should, even after all this time, be returned to the US for sentencing, although the woman concerned (Samantha Geimer – she has allowed her name to be published) has now said that she doesn’t want the matter pursued ...”

“... found their numbers, and a while after that before I picked up the phone.I introduced myself as Jenny Diski and explained who my parents were and which flats we had lived in. I then reintroduced myself in the silence. ‘Jenny Diski – Jenny Simmonds, I used to play with ...”

“... the bin, was getting on in the house of the famous novelist.You can read the next instalment of Jenny Diski's memoir here (and the first one ...”

“... will have wiped at least one episode from your memory bank.You can read the next instalment of Jenny Diski's memoir here (and the first one ...”

“... writing, but typing. So I’ve got cancer. I’m writing.You can read the next instalment of Jenny Diski's memoir ...”

“... It would be nice, wouldn’t it, a sort of comfort in a morally confusing world, to find some sweeping generalisation we could all agree to, regardless of history, culture or class? Only a brave and doubtless partially informed person would claim definitively to have found anything which all humanity has in common beyond microbiology. Try a life without love being meaningless, the need for the individual to have control of the means of production, or the ubiquitous appeal of the smell of frying onions, and there will always be someone ready to show that these truths are not universal ...”

“... We are moved but not overwrought at the fate of those who died at Pompeii, with the sinking of the Mary Rose, during the San Francisco earthquake and at the collapse of the Tay Bridge. We respond much more uneasily to the sinking of the Herald of Free Enterprise, the Estonia and the Marchioness. Lives cut short are less poignant once, to paraphrase Beckett, they would have died anyway ...”

“... Ossie Clark, for those who never hankered after his confections in the late Sixties and early Seventies, was a dress designer. His designs are in museums of fashion quite as legitimately as a gold necklace from ancient Egypt is displayed in the British Museum, or the uniform of the Light Brigade is illustrated in the Imperial War Museum. Each item tells us something about its time and place, certainly not everything, but something ...”

“... There are some questions that are so urgent that they have to be asked repeatedly, even though there has never been, nor ever will be an answer. They may be addressed to another person, but it is just as likely that they are spoken aloud to an empty chair when no one else is present. Certain questions have to be articulated, made real and sent off pulsing into the ether ...”