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The play veered between being really funny and wallowing in embarrassing sentimentality. ‘There’s nothing wrong with sentiment, as long as it’s not masquerading as real feeling,’ said Professor Maxwell at Melbourne University twenty years ago. But in this case it is masquerading. Sentimentality k…

What is the point of this diary? There is always something deeper, that I don’t write, even when I think I’m saying everything.

‘When you’re young,’ said C’s wife, ‘you really believe that two people can make some kind of dream together; but you try it, and you get older, and you come to realise that all there is is you, finally.’

The Age asks me to review Beatrice Faust’s book Women, Sex and Pornography. I file a piece in dialogue form that I really enjoyed writing. They reject it. Would I please rewrite it as a straight review. Rage and contempt. Cutting potatoes and onions, I reflect on the pain of rejection, and on how l…

To Dallas Brooks Hall to hear Roger Woodward play Chopin. A stiffly dramatic performance: some very controlled throwing up of the hands. I liked the music but his presence was so intellectual and contained that one might as well have been watching a movie. Little warmth; but in certain pieces his c…