[Psychiatrists] doing a roaring trade in rich young ladies who've lost the will to live tip Richard as therapy in an each way double with Christina Rossetti…. [He's] currently heavily backed by pushers of brown sugar and watercress and nut omelettes—people so determined to achieve a more beautiful and profound vision of things they reconcile the implacable eating of 'natural' food with the swallowing, inhaling and injecting of various chemical concoctions? Indeed, he's namedropped in most places where there's lots of sensitivity and modernity and drugs and no commonsense going on, where cool languid personalities slump about passing joints like sweaty kisses, speaking of power to the people and freedom and the plight of the gipsies. Such figures are fully paid-up members of the ever expanding market for Richard and his california prose pertry, an eminently greasy brand of verbal psychedelicatessen. (p. 150)

I suffer an oleagineous tasting aftermath from Richard's recipes. I burp and adjudge the flavour is similar to (a) wet and spurious Winifred God. Or (b) Papa Hemingway—when the emphasis was on the pap and his heart was in the wrong place, i.e. in his mouth…. Or (c) the kind of honest injun copywriting favoured by cartels and monopolies in 'prestige' flashyglib ads appearing in the 'quality' press with the message, though we're vast we're no Sheriff of Nottingham, we're Robin Hood, do you realise half our turnover goes in developing new products for the benefit of humanity? (p. 152)