When John Lahr wrote Prick Up Your Ears [in 1978], it irked me.
He writes: "My prick was a plank stuck to her stomach.
The ebb of fern fever, Mr. Allen wrote, had "pricked a precious delusion of the Victorian gentry: that refined tastes were possible only in possessors of refined social backgrounds".
Should pricks who write evil things about Fabrice Muamba really go to prison simply because they're racists who've failed to judge the national mood?
Still, anything organized to kick back against pricks who write stuff like "Everywhere I go, I see women eating on Tubes.
Tim Cook seemed to suggest at the ATD11 conference that Apple might be receptive to the idea of making the iPhone more open to third-party apps, which has companies which write keyboard apps (for example) pricking up their ears.
"Echo's Bones", we are not necessarily surprised to learn, begins in a kind of afterlife, or perhaps afterdeath: "Say what you will, you can't keep a dead mind down," he writes earlier in Pricks.
This must have delighted the older poet, who approached his rivals in a fighting crouch: "Those limp-pricks," he bragged, "I can write rings around any of them".
It also, I believe, gave a new lease of his life to his writing and pricked and stimulated his passion for politics.
He asked the question about Tony that many people are still puzzling over: "Why do we love him so much when he was such a prick?" (Because you wrote the role that way, Mr. Chase).
