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She hadn’t noticed his arm on the back of her chair, how his hair brushed her shoulder when he filled her glass. Without any self-consciousness, without any consciousness at all, she had eased into the man’s presence. In the vestibules between cars he took her arm to steady her, drew her in to him …

This may be bluffing, but I think that one of the dowdiest things about being young is the vague pressure you feel to be constantly subversive, to sneer at oldster evasions, to shun compromise, to seek the hard way out, etc., when really you know that idealism is worse than useless without example,…

'All right. Now. I want you to do a great deal of hard thinking in the next nine or ten months - I'm going to take you anyway; if I don't, somebody else will and you'll only get worse. Stop reading critics, and for Christ's sake stop reading all this structuralist stuff. Just read the poems and wor…

'Have you, have you ever fucked a tart who's had a kid?'

'No.' He didn't hear and turned to me, mouth ajar. I shook my head.

'Well I—' he zig-zagged crazily, squeezed between a taxi and a newspaper van, and drifted two-wheeled up Queensway - 'well I fucking have. And it's no joke. Don't know …

So I am nineteen years old and don't usually know what I'm doing, snap my thoughts out of the printed page, get my looks from other eyes, do not overtake dotards and cripples in the street for fear I will depress them with my agility, love watching children and animals at play but wouldn't mind see…