I did sign one of mine when I saw someone reading it on the tube. I did this because I read Martin Amis deciding against doing so with someone reading his first novel, The Rachel Papers, back in 1973. He thought he would see people reading his books all the time, on the tube, but he never did.

My lips to God’s ear, I listened to this just tonight.

It’s difficult to think of a track that had as profound an impact on my young ears as did God Song. “Now we all see, religion’s just synthetic frippery - un-nec-essary…”

I still like the sound of the hammer thing

Moral hygiene. Strong phrase Ben.

And John Rocker

You could be right, Jennifer, but as a resident of Camden, it appalls me that the vast stretch of land between Mornington Crescent and Euston has been a bomb site for at least a decade now. I’m a mile away, but the glacial rate of progress must be a severe strain on those who live down there.

Bungee jump?

I went to see it three times at the pictures, Debbie. I planned to go a fourth time but couldn’t make the timings work.

The song of the same name by Bad Religion is also very good, Russ.

Got talking to a server at the Kent Ale House in Williamsburg, on a visit to NYC last month, who was wearing a Nets t-shirt. “How they gonna do this year?” I asked, to which she replied “they’re gonna be bad enough that I can still afford to go see em”.

I like it when he writes that people started mistaking guy who played the Marquis De Sod in the TV ads for the owner of the company, “and being actor, he started believing them”.

Money features the best written-down joke I’ve ever read. When John Self goes to collect his ad agency payoff, which he’d been told “would be halfway to six-figures”.

“And it was. It was three figures. £125.”

My comrades on the Left would never ask a question like that, Andrew.

Oh I wish I’d known. I thought her book Twilight of Democracy was very good.

I’m not sure he’s making the convincing case he thinks he is.

Vineland - Thomas Pynchon
Underworld - Don Delillo
Money - Martin Amis
Train - Pete Dexter
NW - Zadie Smith
Vanity Fair - WM Thackeray
The Satanic Verses - Salman Rushdie
Middlemarch - George Elliot
American Pastoral - Philip Roth
A Prayer For Owen Meany - John Irving

(Off the top of my head!)

Tears in the rain. 👏👏👏