It just never occurred to me that the real distance I would have to cross would be in my own mind. In that respect, I had flown half a million miles … - Clive James

Back in the late 1950s, on the sleeve of the Beyond the Fringe record album, Jonathan Miller made a dark joke about his worst fear: being tortured for information that he did not possess. The assumption behind the joke was that if he had something to reveal, the agony would stop. He was looking back to a world of polite British fiction, not to a world of brute European fact. In the Nazi and Soviet cellars and camps, people were regularly tortured for information they did not possess: i.e. they were tortured just for the hell of it.

The question of originality, if it arises at all, can never be peripheral: originality is more than a requirement in good poetry, it is a description of it.

Anyone afraid of what he thinks television does to the world is probably just afraid of the world.