I was brought up on the proletarian left, and I remain there. The fair go for workers is fundamental, and I don't believe the free market has a mind.

One way or another, all the poets of the thirties and forties reacted to Auden, either by rejecting him or trying to absorb him.

In London there was no home cooking worthy of the name. When you were in funds you ate out. But only the people whose faces appeared in such publications as Town and Queen could afford to eat in restaurants serving food which would leave them looking and feeling better instead of worse.

The British hamburger thus symbolised, with savage neatness, the country's failure to provide its ordinary people with food which did anything more for them than sustain life.

The rattle of plastic keys reminds me of a squadron of butterflies failing to fight their way out of a paper bag.

You should never trust anyone who listens to Mahler before they're forty.

Prejudices are useless. Call Los Angeles any dirty name you like - Six Suburbs in Search of a City, Paradise with a Lobotomy, anything - but the fact remains that you are already living in it before you get there