Quotes From Biographies

From Clive James, Unreliable Memoirs:

"... It was the usual Australian Christmas dinner, taking place in the middle of the day. Despite the temperature being 100°F. in the shade, there had been the full panoply of ragingly hot food, topped off with a volcanic plum pudding smothered in scalding custard. My mother had naturally spiced the pudding with sixpences and threepenny bits, called zacs and trays respectively. Grandpa had collected one of these in the esophagus. He gave a protracted, strangled gurgle which for a long time we all took to be the beginning of some anecdote. ..."

"... The only asphalt road in the area led down to the railway line at about the same angle as a door-wedge. It might not sound a very perilous incline, but I was able to prove that it was more than steep enough for a small boy on a tricycle to attain terminal velocity. The pedals became a vicious blur. There was no hope of getting my feet back on them. It was apparent that I would arrive at the bottom of the hill just in time to be flung on to the line in the path of a train even them looming out of the cutting. Hearing my screams, my mother came after me like the back half of Zeno's paradox about Achilles and the tortoise, if you can imagine Achilles in drag and the tortoise screaming its head off while balanced on a shaking bicycle seat with its legs stuck out. She caught up with me at the last moment. ..."

"... Two of the worst Australian spiders are the funnel-web and the trap-door. One is even more lethal than the other but I can't remember which. [...] The funnel-web is a ping-pong ball in a fox-fur. [...] But the real horror among spiders was more likely to be encountered in the lavatory itself. This was the red-back. [...] It had the awkward habit, in unsewered areas like ours, of lurking under the lavatory seat. If a red-back bit you on the behind you were left with the awkward problem of where to put the tourniquet and not long to think about it. Nor could you ask anyone to suck out the poison, unless you knew them very well indeed. ..."

From Clive James, Falling Towards England [Unreliable Memoirs II]

"... they were tanned a colour so reddish it was almost strawberry. It was another episode in my long history of unsuitable shoes, a story which is not yet closed and would need a book of its own. Let's just say that even now, when I have learned to dress as plainly as possible, I still get so impatient with the whole time-consuming business of covering up exposed skin that I will buy the first thing that catches my eye, and that when it comes to shoes the first thing that catches your eye is the last thing you should ever put on your feet. It is almost better to be an impulse shirt-buyer than an impulse shoe-buyer. I have worn shirts that made people think I was a retired Mafia hit-man or a Yugoslavian sports convener from Split, but I have worn shoes that made people think I was insane."

"At the time I left Australia it was already on the verge of becoming one of the great wine countries of the world, but I won't pretend I was in any way au courant with the incipient viticultural breakthrough. My idea of a fine wine was one that merely stained your teeth without stripping the enamel."

From Clive James, May Week was in June [Unreliable Memoirs III] :

Arriving in Cambridge on my first day as an undergraduate, I could see nothing except a cold white October mist. [...] For all I knew, Cambridge was receiving me with open arms. They could have had flags out. There could have been a band playing. It was impossible to tell. The white opacity came all the way to my eyeballs. [...] After that, I was on the right track to the city centre, where there was enough light to distinguish people from letter boxes. The letter boxes, in my perhaps embittered view, had warmer personalities than the people [...] [p. 15]
My theatrical urges were further stimulated by the purchase of a gown. Throwing my bearded chin upright and drawing the gown's drapes around my shoulders, I looked like a Wittelsbach crown prince going mildly ga-ga or a close friend of Count Dracula in search of a meal. When I appeared that evening in Hall there was a hush on the benches and some of the freshmen seemed to feel vulnerable in the area of the neck. Actually, I would have done better to dine off them than off the food. This latter proved only useful as a discussion point. The entrée wasn't tender enough to be a paving stone and the gravy couldn't have been primordial soup because morphogenesis was already taking place. [p. 18]
[...] Delmer Dynamo. His pear-shaped head, I could now see, was situated on top of a pear-shaped body, which his black gown caused to resemble a piece of fruit going to a funeral. [p. 19]
[...] his accent, during the course of one term, lost all trace of antipodean colouring, and acquiring, during the course of a second term, an affinity with that of Princess Margaret. 'Eigh-ow,' he would neigh, 'rarely?' He meant 'Oh really' but the expression emerged like a chicken which had been strangled in a letter box and then pushed out the slit. [p. 30]
To say the disaster unfolded would be to exaggerate its pace. The disaster developed at the speed of stale cheese growing blue hair. It was all low points, but perhaps the lowest was a song about a jewel robbery which Spencer and I, greatly please with our own ingenuity, had written to the tune of Ravel's Bolero. Six of the cast were meant to sing it while tip-toeing in intricate patterns around the stage. If they had merely forgotten the words it would have been a mercy. Pummeled by the waves of indifference from the auditorium, however, they remembered the words, but in the wrong order. Since the choreography was cued by the lyrics, the actors were soon out of sequence. Eventually two of them were out of sight, having taken craven advantage of their proximity to the wings. It was hard to blame them. [p. 38]
I was officially advised that during the long vacation it might be profitable to attain at least a nodding acquaintance with the curriculum, and thus stave off the already likely possibility that I would receive a degree classified so low it would be tantamount to a certificate of mental disability. [p. 45]
When I opened the door and stepped into [my] darkened room, I fell across the bed and smacked my forehead smartly against the opposite wall. Luckily the wall, under its many geological layers of plaster and paint, was sufficiently resilient to absorb most of the impact. It was also quite moist. When I found the light switch, a twenty-watt bulb dispelled just enough gloom to reveal that the moisture was not my blood. It was rising damp. It was also descending damp, with a good deal of transverse damp mixed in. The smell of mould was tropical. The temperature of the air, on the other hand, was arctic. There was a two-bar electric fire, one of whose bars worked reasonably well for half its length. [p. 58]
[... I] got out of my room in the Eagle only just in time to avoid being consumed by the killer mould. My new room was rented from a nice young couple of graduate scientists who needed the money. Apart from my habit of smoking in bed while drunk, from their viewpoint I must have been the ideal tenant, because I was busy in Footlights almost all the time. [...] I changed my sheets about once a term, but never slept in them long enough to turn them any very deep shade of grey. A pot of jam that I left with its lid off for two or three months was mysteriously removed. Apart from that there was no interference in my freedom. [p. 81]
I have only gone halfway towards describing [Dave] Dalziel's principal and most troublesome protégeé, Keith Visconti. Though Keith's anabasis from the status of comprehensive school expellee to potential cinéaste should not be derided even in retrospect, there were several reasons to think that on top of being illiterate and odiferous he was also clinically insane, with overtones of petty larceny. He had, however, an inborn knack for thinking in sequences. He understood the essential grammar of eyelines and reverse angles without needing to have it set out for him in diagram form. Of no fixed abode, he seemed to live out of the gabardine overcoat which he wore at all times. It shone in a way that any piece of clothing does when it is dirty enough. Clutched tightly against the coat, because too big to fit into either of its bulging pockets, was a ten-minute show reel, made on short ends, which featured a friend of his, dressed as a waiter, serving another friend of his, dressed even more inconvincingly as a business man, with a cup of coffee. Despite the implausibility of the casting, sets and costumes, the action all happened in the right order. This was enough to convince Dalziel that Keith Visconti was a genius, an impression that Keith said nothing to contradict. Keith never said anything. He just stood there in his grotty overcoat, silent and immobile. Dalziel was thus able to read into his new pupil all his own qualities of inventiveness, lucidity and scruple. [p. 89]
Not everyone who wants to make a film is crazy, but almost everyone who is crazy wants to make a film. It is just one of the things that crazy people want to do, like starting a law suit or sending long, unsolicited letters to people in the public eye. A letter from a nutter has a recognisable format and orthography, as if all letter-writing nutters have to go through some kind of Top Gun nutter-letter-writing academy. Usually - I think I've said this before, so maybe I'm going nuts too - the letter is written in green ink and its many pages are tied together with a bootlace in the top left-hand corner. Even if typed, however, the letter will continue after the signature in a PS which will run around the edge of the page in a dense spiral until the whole of the margin is packed tight. This will occur no matter how many leaves the letter consists of - rarely fewer than twelve - and even if the verso of each page is left blank. Usually it isn't. Every space is filled up. Though the combination of energy and futility can be depressing to contemplate, at least the nutter letter can be written on a low budget. The nutter movie costs thousands of pounds at the very least, and if the nutter hasn't got the money himself then he will have to get it from someone else. [p. 93]
[...] Her husband, I had guessed, must have been that object covered with coats and hats that we passed in the hallway [...] [p. 108]
A prima donna on stage, she was even more so off it, and after the drama critic of the Cambridge Evening News named her as Actress of the Year she went over the top like a regiment. Previously, though she had been unable to cycle up Castle Hill towards Girton without making innocent passers-by suspect that she might be Lady MacBeth, she had been subject to brief bouts of normal behaviour. Now she would take notes in a Sidgewick Avenue lecture theatre with such an air of commitment that the lecturer would break off and ask her if anything was wrong. [p. 113]
The place was jammed with its late afternoon regulars when Consuela made an entrance. In full drag as a tempestuous gypsy princess, she was pretty enough to stop a speeding train. A whole room full of aesthetes ceased talking about themselves and looked at her. She shook her head. She threw it slowly back, raised her clenched fists to her forehead, and rocked as if her body was in the throes of rejecting a brain transplant. Then she lowered her arms, looked at me again, shook her head slowly, and made an exit. Everyone looked at me. If she had left it at that, they all might have at least remained in doubt, but over the next few days she told everyone the details individually. [p. 117]
By the time the visitor - I recall him as being the Hale Professor of Raillery at Yale, but I must have got that wrong - had finished isolating, exemplifying and analysing what he took to be Swift's techniques of comic invention, anyone present with even a vestige of a sense of humour was, or should have been, praying for death. The professor was a bore on a Guggenheim, a long-range drone, and international ballistic fossil. I spent the whole hour drawing little pictures of hanged men, [...] [p. 120]
When the bell rang to start the Italian hunting season, devotees of la caccia drove at full speed into the woods and shot everything that moved. Since the animals were sensibly lying low, most of the victims were people. Advancing at random through woods, the hunters - whose minds, like their expensive guns, were on a hair trigger - fire when they thought they saw something. Often they had seen each other. They also killed civilians in nearby villages. the occasional animal got hit, but only by a fluke. One man blasted a rabbit that was already hanging from another man's belt. So much vehicular traffic on the woodland roads, however, ensured that a considerable amount of wildlife was run over. [p. 144]
[...] it was not a very salubrious kayf. I was writing poems about Florence. They were full of Medici pomp and Machiavellian circumstance, of tasselled banners and blazing trumpets, the sweet waistlines of Paolo Uccello handmaidens, and the crackling flames of Savonarola's pyre. All this I wrote about while sitting under a chalked menu announcing that spam fritters with two veg could be followed by spotted dick with custard. Outside the dirty window, rain that for some reason would only make it dirtier fell thinly but persistently, like a small annoyance. [p. 149-150]
Another shock was the hitherto unannounced presence of Romaine Rand, who had already taken another room on the same floor as mine. Indeed it was the room next to mine. It was the big front room facing onto the street. In something less than a week, Romaine, who in another time and place might have run the sort of salon that Goethe and the boys would have swarmed around like blowflies, had already transformed her room into a dream from the Arabian nights. Drawing on her incongruous but irrepressible skills as a housewife, she had tatted lengths of batik, draped bolts of brocade, swathed silk, swagged satin, ruched, ruffed, hemmed and hawed. There were oriental carpets and occidental screens, ornamental plants and incidental music. The effect was stunning. Aristotle Onassis had married Jackie Kennedy in vain hopes of getting his yacht to look like that. Romaine, however, once she had got her life of luxury up and running, dud not luxuriate. She had a typewriter the size of a printing press. Instantly she was at it, ten hours a day. Through the lath-and-plaster wall I could hear her attacking the typewriter as if she had a contract, with penalty clauses, for testing it to destruction. As well as finalising her thesis, apparently, she was working on a book. [...] I resolved that I, too, would transmogrify my environment. Picking out a section of wall where a shelf might go, I tapped it with a testing forefinger. About a square foot of plaster fell off and brained a cockroach.
Making large plans to decorate my eyrie on a scale that would put Romaine to shame, I set off next morning for the Do It Yourself Hire and Supply shop in Hills Road. Somehow I never found it. At the cinema, the DIY Hire and Supply advertisement had always been the one I had most trouble identifying with. It featured an old man with a Ringo Starr haircut who smiled at you while boring holes with a Black and Decker drill. I was well aware of what would happen if I tried to smile at anybody while boring holes. [p. 143-154]
At that time I was enslaved to the music of Richard Strauss. I knew Der Rosenkavelier note for note, could do a traffic-stopping imitation of Ljuba Welitsch in the final scene from Salome, and would contentedly croon both parts of the long two-girl duet from Arabella while writing a nit-picking review of Accident. Considering that I couldn't sing the National Anthem in a way that made it sound significantly different from "Rock Around the Clock", this incantory Strauss-worship must have sounded pretty strange from the outside, but inside my head it had the full, drenching beauty of that reprehensible old opportunist at his most sumptuous: the shimmering swirl of strings that drapes the soprano like a Fortuny gown, the passing phrase, the orgasmic crescendo, the sudden silence. Not too much, in my version, of the sudden silence. [p. 174-175]
Ariadne was to be sung by Margaret Roberts, a trouper. It was the other kind of trooper that she swore like when she saw the costume which had been provided for her. Diaphanous in all the wrong places, it looked like Eva Peron's negligée, an impression abetted by the platform mules with pink pom-poms and the sequined cloche flying helmet. A down-to-earth sort of girl, Margaret was prepared to act the temptress, but not in a comedy. Nor was she any more tolerant than Alberto of bright young people dabbling in the arts. She handed back the dress. "You can burn that," she said, "and don't forget to bury the ashes. It might grow again." From her travelling wardrobe she produced a complete Ariadne costume of her own. Previous experience had told her to be prepared. [p. 176]
During the long process of acquiring the right stamps, stickers, sealing wax and bits of string I gradually sobered up, until by the time the parcel was ready for acceptance I had qualms. [...] The Italian post offices were temples to bureaucracy in those days, sufficient all by themselves to cause a breakdown in civil order. Constantly mutating meaningless regulations ensured that your parcel, when you finally got to the head of the queue, would never be accepted the first, second or third time. Even when you had the right gauge of brown paper, thickness of string and redness of sealing wax, unless you timed your run for the end of the day they would have introduced some new rule about writing the address four times or tying the thing up with a pink ribbon. Coping, Françoise grep cooler as I grew angrier. Finally, when I was down on the floor on my knees, pounding my fist on the tiles, she was smiling seraphically at some official in a cap. He was the one who said there was no problem; he couldn't understand how the difficulty had arisen; was the signorina's friend perhaps the victim of some unfortunate mental disease? [p. 196]
[...] we were obliged to hitch-hike. In her two-piece raw silk suit and high heeled sandals, Françoise must have been the best dressed hitch-hiker since Lola Montes. On the approach roads to the autostrada, Italian male drivers of expensive sports cars were eager to break the law and stop, especially if they thought she was alone. I encouraged this misapprehension by hiding myself behind a bush. If there was no bush available I would conceal myself in the nearest depression, feeling pretty depressed myself. In shallow holes lined with dried mud I would cower cursing. When I heard the shriek of brakes I would dustily emerge and shamble forward. Some of the drivers looks a bit pissed off but very few of them tried to cancel the deal. [...] The recently completed stretch of the autostrada down from Bologna through the mountains towards Florence had instantly established itself as one of the most frightening experiences in modern Europe. There were three lanes each way. None of them was a slow lane. Articulated trucks with two trailers in tandem swung out from lane to lane without warning just as you were trying to overtake them. [...] When a truck pulled out, our boy would duck inside, ignoring the possibility that the truck might try to go back where it had come from, thereby crushing us against the wall of a tunnel or propelling us a thousand feet down into a rocky gorge. All this was happening at about ninety [miles per hour]. The hard shoulders of the road were littered with wrecks. Particularly affecting was a Lancia saloon divided into two widely separated pieces. Françoise had insisted on climbing into the back seat with me. Our driver kept turning around to compliment her on her Italian and insert his nose into her cleavage. Meanwhile I attempted to draw his attention to the the imminent death looming in front. It was a nice exercise in relative time. We got to Florence in a few hours, having aged ten years. [p. 196-197]

From Pamela Stephenson, Billy [A biography of comedian Billy Connolly]:

Every morning, right after their porridge, the children would be given a delicious spoonful of sickly-sweet molasses, followed by a vomit-making dollop of cod-liver oil. Billy begged to be given the oil first. "Why, oh why," he wondered, "can't I have the nice stuff last to take away the nasty taste?" But he was always given the molasses first.
His aunts were not the only ones who believed the hard way was the best way, and that safety resided in suffering. Billy says that many a Glaswegian has cast troubled eyes on a brilliant, sunshine day and muttered, "Och, we'll pay for this!"
[p. 22]
But, despite his early star pupil status, Billy was terrified of the nuns, and was especially wary of Sister Philomena who had pictures of hell on her wall that looked like travel brochures. Billy assumed she'd been there. [p. 28]
Mona and Margaret both dolled themselves up whenever they ventured out. When nylons were in short supply, the sisters would get creative with Bisto, plastering the gravy all over their bare legs and wandering around the city stinking like a Sunday dinner. [p. 36]
Scots have long objected to the pejorative lines once used in the [British] Anthem:
"God grant, and with a mighty rush,
Rebellious Scots to crush".
Not surprisingly, Billy has proposed the institution of a new National Anthem. The tune would be the theme from the long-running and popular BBC radio series, The Archers, while the words would go:
"Dum de dum de dum de dum
Dum de dum de dah dah
Dum de dum de dum de dum
Dum de diddle de dum."
[p. 52]
Being the tricksters they were, John and Billy got up to a variety of shenanigans in the hostels. One of their favourite tricks was slicing people's bananas inside the skin: holding the banana vertical, they would carefully stick a sewing needle into it at right angles, then move it side to side so it dissected the flesh. They repeated this at one-inch intervals all the way down the banana.
In another ingenious operation, they would steal a person's egg, make a minute hole in both ends and blow it empty. Then they wrote an "Excuse me" note on delicately rolled-up toilet paper and slid it inside the egg. People who went to bed with their socks on were prime targets for the cousins. When one of these innocents was asleep, Billy and John would remove one sock and put it over the other. They thought it was hilarious fun to watch the victim searching in vain for his missing sock the next morning.
[p. 79]
When Billy learned "frailing", a type of strumming, from Pete Seeger's book How to Play the Five-String Banjo, he was dismayed to discover the technique played havoc with his fingernails. The guitarist John Pearse told him that flamenco guitarists strengthened their worn-down nails with layers of cigarette paper and nail varnish, but Billy found that method far too messy. His friend Hamish Imlach advised him to stuff himself with Jelly Babies, presumably for their gelatin content, but that didn't work, and neither did mountains of raw broccoli. Over the years, Billy has tried commercial liquid nail hardeners, silk wrapping and acrylic nails, none of which have been successful. He now applies several layers of Revlon nail repair kit, carries nail buffers, polish and several grades of files with him at all times, and heaven help anyone who asks him to do a household job that results in a broken nail. "If anyone peeked inside my banjo case," confesses Billy, "they'd think I was a manicurist."
[p. 105]
"Banjo players' wives are always driven crazy by the noise," Billy announced to me a couple of years ago, as if he were telling me something I didn't already know. Hearing a single banjo lick being practiced over and over again in your house is a truly tortuous experience.
"What's the difference between a banjo and an onion?" I tease him. "Nobody cries when you slice up a banjo."
"How many banjo players does it take to change a light bulb?" he returns.
"Just one, but he does it over and over again ..."
[p. 106]
By now, Billy was performing virtuoso banjo solos such as "Cripple Creek" or "Down the Road", and humourous introductions ("I'd like to dedicate this to nervous flatulence: it's called 'Windy and Warm' "). [...]
The music of the Humblebums resonated with the class-conscious sensibilities of their audiences. "I'd like to dedicate this song to everyone who ends up in the Dunfermline Infirmary after visiting the local police station there," Billy would proclaim, referring to recent cases of suspected Police brutality. "They usually fall down the stairs." He followed that with his parody of the Crystals hit "And then He Kissed Me" that he re-titled "And then He Kicked Me".
[p. 112]
When Billy first met Iris Pressagh in 1965, he thought she was delightful, very beautiful and, moreover, she never once vomited on him. [p. 112]
Billy had always thought it would be rather nice to be famous and maybe rich into the bargain, but above all he just wanted to be windswept and interesting. [p. 128]
On the road, Gerry and Billy used to amuse themselves by reading newspaper reports of unlikely court cases to each other, like the one about a man who slaughtered animals in an abattoir. In his passport he had described his occupation as "killer"; still he could not understand why he was refused entry to Spain. [p. 129-130]
It is 7:15 p.m. on a Thursday night in January 2001. I am over-stretched, trying to write a patient report, prepare a lecture, clean up the dog pee and check on a child's homework before Billy and I leave for a charity event in Beverly Hills. We are due there at eight. Billy pops his head in to remind me that I have just fifteen minutes to get dressed for what will be a very flashy, public event. Twenty minutes later, I climb into the car, breathing heavily. I am now wearing an outfit that seemed like a good idea a few minutes ago.
"Jesus, Pamsy," he exclaims, you look like you glued your body and dived into the wardrobe."
I shoot him a look, which causes him to revise his comment.
"No, I mean, you look great .. er, did you try that on in the shop?"
[p. 136]
Billy absolutely loves babies. He refers to them as "talking sausages" and has quite a way with them all. If you ever need a baby to fall asleep, Billy's your man. Hes has a special technique called "Sleepy-Toes" that never fails. [p. 153]
Billy sits up and zaps the alarm. "I'm going back to my natural wake-up call," he announces.
"What's that?" I wrench myself upright.
"Before I go to sleep, I tap myself on the forehead with my index finger, once for every hour until I reach the time I want to wake."
"Has it ever worked for you?" I ask hesitantly.
"Nooo," he hedges, "but then, I'm a man of unusual ability. I know things that would confound medical science. [...]"
[p. 218]
Sharks are omnipresent around Sydney beaches. [...] Billy came back for lunch one day, furious. "People are so inconsiderate," he said, "always letting off their bloody car alarms. It gets everyone in such a panic. Every few minutes, hundreds of them rush out of the water to see if it's their car that's being broken into." I didn't have the heart to tell him it was the shark alarm he was hearing.
[p. 220]
"Wouldn't it be good it we all had ideas as good as Howard Hughes?" he mused. "Of course he was a bit of a space cadet, but I can't find fault with the idea of being transported around in a drugged state."
Apparently, Hughes preferred to be injected with a sleeping drug in his bed at home and to wake up in his country of destination with no conscious memory of the flight. "It's a brilliant idea," Billy decided. "In my humble opinion, the guy was years ahead of his time ... but then ..." he poked at his wilted lettuce, "maybe he just had a pathological hatred of aeroplane food."
[p. 220-221]
Billy loses track of time when he's on stage. On several occasions, he has misread his watch and performed an hour longer than usual. On one famous occasion, he performed over four hours at the Sydney Opera House and his audience ended up being locked out of the car park: the man just loves performing. [p. 223]
[...] he discussed the curious logic and use of language he always hears in the Irish countryside generally. It always makes him roar.
"You're the spitting image of yourself," someone had said to him in a pub near Ballyconneely. A woman wanting bacon in another village was berating a salesperson: "What kind of post office is this, with no rashers?"
[p. 232]
18 May. Back home in Bray. [...] I feel as if I am put-upon by everyone, a typical after-tour feeling. A cold panic as one realizes that there is no room service on the telephone dial, no tea and biscuits at the lift of the phone. [...] [p. 233]
Billy was able to do quite subtle comedy in that situation, including a set piece about a baby-monitors, in which he did a priceless impersonation of a sleeping baby: "Don't buy one of those intercoms," he advised his audience. "Babies pretend to be dead. They're bastards and they do it on purpose."
[...] "Well, don't worry. I read that sixty-eight per cent of all British men masturbate on a regular basis. How do they know? Does it show up on the Richter Scale? [...]"
[p. 234]
Billy still wears a tea cosy on his head whenever he gets the chance. Our family motto has become: "Never trust a man who, when left alone in a room with a tea cosy, doesn't try it on." [p. 235]
Billy had told the audience that, when Scottish people take their clothes off, they're blue and that it takes a whole week of sunbathing to become white. [p. 240]
In the past Billy had made fun of the place [California]: "Any town that's got an all-night, drive-in taxidermist has got to be weird," he would say. [p. 247]
Arctic spring has no darkness at all, so Billy had to remember to sleep. At first he would wake up with a start in the sunlit night thinking a bear had come, because the iceberg was very noisy. Icebergs are freshwater giants floating on seawater and, as they are raised and lowered by the tide, they growl. [...]
[...] He learned that Inuit names are not gender-specific. When a child is born, a name is not given until they recognize who from the past has been reincarnated. Once the traits of a particular ancestor are perceived, the child is named after that person, whoever it is. So a boy, for example, might be given his grandmother's name; as a term of endearment his own mother might call him "mum" and he in return would call her "daughter".
The Inuit visited Billy every now and again to give him ice from the iceberg for his tea. They have a spiritual connection to the iceberg, so they first talked to it, to explain what Billy was up to, dwelling in its vicinity. They believe the spirits of their ancestors come to see them every year in the icebergs then disappear until the next spring. By the end of his time, Billy could see little groups of people inside the iceberg, groups of four and five huddled together, all with their hoods up, talking. Billy would tease his daytime visitors. "Gosh, your ancestors were a bit noisy last night."
[p. 258-259]
Orkney is a magical Viking place with its own peculiar atmosphere that intrigues Billy. That's where he invented the bare-bum dance. He did it because he didn't know what to do with the standing stones. [...]
Billy strongly recommends that the notice boards in historical sites such as that do a rethink. Instead of guessing the purpose of the stones, he would prefer something more frank: "We have no idea what this is. Try to leave it the way you found it." His own solution to addressing the mystery of the ancient stones was to resist stating the obvious and simply dance around them naked, like an old Celt.
[p. 263]
The slapstick behaviour in that film [The Imposters] was not confined to the screen. Allison Janney turned up one day with a fart machine made from a tumbler with special putty inside; when she rammed her fingers in, it made a most realistic noise of breaking wind. Everyone rushed out to procure more of these and there were many more on the set the following day. It was absolute mayhem, with Steve Buscemi doing the splits in mid-air to a loud farting noise.
Stanley Tucci encourage improvised inventiveness so, during one of the scenes, Billy sneaked a favourite greeting he'd received from a passing drag act when he had appeared with his banjo and earrings on the breakfast show Good Morning Massachusetts in the early seventies. In a lovers' tiff scene between the two gay characters in The Imposters, Oliver had to slap Billy in the face. "Savage gypsy lover!" Billy returned, to off-camera howls, followed by: "Don't you like the taut roundness that exercise brings to the buttocks?"
[p. 268]
Once in Aberdeen, Billy parked his car across the street from the cigar shop on a double-yellow line next to a bank treasury truck. As soon as he parked, he was besieged by Aberdeen supporters en route to the local game. Billy dutifully sat in his car and signed autographs, some on bank notes, which were passed to him for signing. As he passed them back, he thought, as he always does when people ask him to sign money: "I wonder what these people are going to do with them? Frame them, I suppose." [...]
Billy returned to his car, relieved he hadn't been booked for waiting on a double-yellow line. He signed a few more autographs, then headed south for the motorway. He hadn't even reached the outskirts of Aberdeen when there was the wailing and flashing of police vehicle behind him and he was requested through a loud-hailer to pull into the next side street. [...]
Billy was completely mystified. The officer sat him in the back seat, with police officers beside him, and got on the radio to headquarters. He proceeded to speak to a voice at the other end. "Well, Sir, we found the driver of the red Range Rover ... yes we apprehended him ... and, believe it or not, it's Billy Connolly."
There was a sharp intake of breath at the other end of the radio and then a pause. Then the voice said quietly: "The Billy Connolly?"
"Aye, the comedian."
"Put him on ... Mr Connolly, were you parked in Market Street today?"
"I don't know. I was parked next to a toy shop in town on a double-yellow line next to a security van opposite the cigar store."
"Yes, that's Market Street."
"Then I was parked there."
Billy was puzzled. He thought they'd gone to incredible lengths to apprehend a man who'd parked on a double-yellow, unless someone had robbed the security van in the meantime.
"What were you doing there?"
"Buying a cigar."
"We were watching you on CCTV while you were speaking to a crowd of people."
"Oh yes - I was signing autographs. Mostly for Aberdeen supporters on their way to the game."
There was silence for a minute or so. Then: "On what were you signing these autographs?"
"Money, mostly, fives, tens, twenties ... and some little bits of paper, but mostly money."
He could hear laughing on the other end. The policeman in the car was nodding sagely.
"What exactly is going on?" Billy was getting fed up.
"Mr Connolly, we were watching your car," explained the voice, "and we saw a great deal of money changing hands. We couldn't see the driver, but we were concerned because two of the people were the most notorious drug dealers in Aberdeen."
"I can assure you I'm clean," protested Billy, "and have been for a long, long time. You can search my car if you like." They declined to do so.
"I would appreciate it if you wouldn't tell anyone about this," the voice appealed to Billy as he left the car.
"Are you kidding?" Billy snorted. "I'm a comedian for God's sake, this is manna from heaven."
[p. 271-273]
"Blonde hair is a delight when it's on a blonde woman ... and so scary when it's on top of a face like mine," he added, peering at his reflection in the hall mirror. "As my father used to tell me in the sixties, I look like a tramp peering out of a hayloft."
[p. 279]

From Bruce Dessau, Rowan Atkinson [A biography of actor Rowan Atkinson] :

Atkinson suddenly found some unlikely supporters in the press. Bob Monkhouse sprang to his defence conceding that "New York is a tough place. The RSC [Royal Shakespearean Company] once did Julius Ceasar there. When Ceasar was stabbed onstage half the audience left because they didn't want to get involved." [p. 184]
Meanwhile the world continued to succumb to the movie's charms. Japan soon gave in too. The movie took $3 million in its first three weeks, while there was a story that Rover in Japan was marketing 200 Mini Mayfairs with black bonnets à la Bean -- despite the fact that the Mini did not even appear in the finished film. In fact, Bean had a deeper impact in the Orient than even Atkinson might have expected. In June 1998, The Guardian reported that graduates of Tokyo's National Personnel Authority had voted Bean as the boss they would most like to work for. A survey of 788 high-flyers put Bean ahead of three major baseball-team managers. Japan's own slapstick icon Tora San had died in 1997, and Bean was seen as a natural successor by many. [p. 320]
[Ben] Elton was rapidly becoming a spokesperson for Atkinson in absentia. In late 1998, he appeared on a number of shows to promote Blackadder: The Whole Damn Dynasty. On Channel Four's low-brow TFI Friday, he told Chris Evans that even when Rowan had passed on, his gravestone would carry the words: "I know you are dead, but when's the next Blackadder?" [p. 333]

From John Shelby Spong, Here I Stand:

[Note from Fred: When I first heard the name 'Spong', I giggled (possibly with envy). Later I heard John Spong on (the Australian) ABC Radio National, and was most impressed. My initial reaction was rekindled briefly when I encountered another unusual name in the following words]
Somewhere in the early 1800s my great-great-grandfather, the firstborn son of John Spong and Letitia Halfhead, [...]
[Postscript from Fred: About 2 years after reading Mr. Spong's book I read "Made In America" by Bill Bryson, in which he mentions that 'spong' is an old world for 'parcel of land']
After listening to the openly expressed prejudice for a few moments, my father stopped the conversation cold by saying, "Didn't you folks know that I'm Jewish? My original name was Spongberg, but we shorted it to Spong." It brought the conversation to a halt. To my knowledge, not a drop of Jewish blood flowed through his veins, but a sense of decency, at least on this issue, did.
For some reason I had to return to my car to pick up something I had left. By this time the temperature was nearly 100 degrees Fahrenheit. [...] When I opened [the car], I spotted John Hines's tennis clothes - his shorts, his shirt, and his athletic supporter. If they had been a bit spicy when he took them off following the tennis match, they were rancid now. [...] I discovered that John Hines was already at the airport, but that his plane would not depart for at least an hour. [...] The three of us zoomed out to the National Airport. We located John and with mock piety and high ceremony we presented him with our package of tennis goodies. [...] But it must have been the first time in ecclesiastical history that an Anglican primate was presented with a smelly jockstrap as the final gift of his episcopal career.
[...] the things you learn when you become a widower, such as the heretofore unknown-to-me fact that a clothes dryer had a lint filter that needed to be cleaned regularly lest the dryer burn itself up and perhaps the house with it, which had come perilously close to being my experience, [...]
Clarence Pope would someday, like the bishop of London, leave Anglicanism for the Roman Catholic tradition, except that, in Clarence's case, he would return six months later when he came to the conclusion that Rome did not treat him as if he were important enough. [Former Bishop Pope had a hard time making up his mind, for I learned that after more than a year back in the Anglican Communion, he once again defected to Rome, only to return a second time. Headline writers in religious journals loved to proclaim, "Pope Becomes Catholic Again," or "Pope Leaves Roman Catholic Church Again."]
Most of his critics had minds so circumscribed by traditional dogma that they could not even imagine [Don Cupitt's] new place, and so they condemned him as "an atheistic theologian." An atheistic theologian is one who does not affirm the God concept of his critics.

From Tom Baker, Who on Earth is Tom Baker?:

Because the process of taking bets, or making a book, was illegal, the system of identifying betting slips was important. How to identify the winner of a bet? The punter couldn't put his real name on the slip for fear the police might raid the premises, find the slips and identify the gambler. This risk was avoided by a system of nome de plumes. Once chose the name was better kept so that the bookie's clerk didn't get confused. There was often surprising ingenuity in the choice of name. [...] One disgraced classicist used Thucydides which caused pronunciation problems back at base. The accepted explanation was that Thucydides was Turkish for nancy boy. The excitement of this watching for "The Law" was intense. We were brought up to hate the police only slightly less than the Billy Boys from Salisbury Road. "Once a policeman, never a man" went the saying, and nobody denied it. We could not name a single saint who had been a policeman, nor did they have a patron saint. [p. 9]
Even at the age of eight I was an embarrassment to everyone because of my preoccupation with God.
"Do you realize that God is everywhere?" I'd ask, echoing Miss Egan from school.
"Yes, we know He's everywhere, we know the catechism too, you know."
"No, I mean everywhere," I'd insist, ignoring the tone of voice from my uncle Bill, who didn't seemed to be impressed by God's omnipresence.
"Yes, God is all over the place, there isn't anywhere that God is not in. Or up." I had to have the last word even if it meant hell. "He's even up the leg of Mrs Pierrepoint's Drawers."
Auntie Louie would look at me warningly and I'd take the hint from her and her alone.
[p. 13]
In our house we drank tea all the time. The kettle was on all day. My mother was a thirty-cup-a-day supper and we easily burned the arse out of three kettles a year. Today I can easily drink nine cups a day and probably, if I wasn't married, I could emulate me Mam and approach the magic thirty mark. There was only one woman in the street who could out-drink our Mam and that was Mrs Goodstone who had a son with a club foot. On a bad day we'd hear that Brenda, that was her name, had reached thirty-three cups. This news would be received in tight-lipped silence and me Mam would lower her head. Thirty-three was Mam's ideal number. She was proud to be in the thirty group as that was the age of Our Blessed Lord when he did His first miracle at the marriage feast at Canaan, the changing of the water into wine. [...]
Thirty-three was a sacred number as it was the age of Our Blessed Lord at the time of His last miracle, the sticking back of the ear [See Luke, Chapter 22, 50-51]. It was said that a woman who could drink thirty-three cups down to the lees would receive a message from Pope Pius the XII, Eugene Pacelli that was. But I can't be certain of this for great piss-the-beds often have very selective memories.
[p. 13-14]
During the 1940s every boy I knew read the comics. [...]
In the Adventure, there was one character who puzzled us. He was called Alf Tupper, the Tough of the Track. Alf was very working class, rough of speech and lived in an abandoned railway carriage and only ate fish and chips. He was just like us except that he was a brilliant athlete. The stories were about his triumphs over drawling fellows with double-barrelled names who wore Norfolk jackets and said "I say, you chaps" an awful lot. He was our first anti-hero, I think, bloody-minded and full of spirit, with no desire to be like the drawling enemy. These stories swamped our imaginations and reinforced our mistrust of girls and our patronizing attitudes towards foreigners.
[p. 20-22]
When I was about nine years old I was struck with abscesses on the back of my left leg. They got so bad that I had to stay in hospital for several days. The pain of having my abscesses squeezed was really very severe and it upset me terribly. The nurses chosen for this ghastly job had tremendous thumbs. I think that most nurses in those days had powerful thumbs but the squeezers were very special. I still tremble at the sight of highly developed female thumbs. The squeezing nurses always seemed to work in pairs. One would hold you down while the other with raised thumbs and flickering tongue would approach and, with sacramental precision, would complete the torture. These squeezing sisters always seemed to be red-headed and very freckled. And when they had squeezed all the pus-filled children in the dressing station they would cruise the wards to back up other nurses. Especially they were useful to their ward sisters when it came to making the children eat up their food. One day I was ordered to eat up my cabbage. Being rather undisciplined and mostly used to jam butties and sweet tea I refused to obey their order. At my refusal to eat up my greens, the two ward sisters glanced at each other and clicked their fingers and, as if by a miracle, two thumbs appeared topped by freckles and red hair. I was pushed back against my pillow by the finger clickers while "Power Thumbs" slapped a wad of cabbage across my mouth and tried to force it down my throat with her magic thumbs which were a bit like tyre levers. Struggling to resist the force feeding which made me feel sick, I began in my fear to fart like a buffalo. The finger and thumbs trio of freckled harpies were appalled by my grossness, involuntary though it was.
"Stop that stink," they screamed, "stop it." But I couldn't stop it. Like a lost and panic-stricken tug boat in a thick fog I farted on in various keys of terror. Gasping for breath, the cabbage squad retired and conceded defeat.
[p. 22-23]
Keeping clean in a family of fourteen wasn't easy. In the mornings the smell of Lifebuoy soap filled the house. Actually the smell of soap pervaded the whole of Liverpool most of the time. At school the smell was of Derbac soap, the instant slayer of lice. The lice were hunted by a special squad of highly trained women who were chosen for their eagle vision. Sometimes they could tell you had live when you were thirty yards away. Being a Lice Lady was quite a good job in those days as so many of us were lousy a good deal of the time. It was a very common sight to see small groups of children standing on a corner with jam butties in one hand and the other busily scratching away at the tops of their heads like miniature Stan Laurels. [...]
At school, we were very preoccupied with cleanliness and Godliness and leprosy and the sufferings of waifs and strays in Africa, while our Guardian Angels perched on our shoulders sneezing away in the clouds of dandruff and falling lice. [...] Fr. Nolan, our parish priest, was forever haranguing us about saints and lepers. [...] His favourite leper man was a Fr. Damian who simply adored lepers. [...] "Our Lord loves a leper, because He made them lepers in His mysterious wisdom and not only does he love a leper. He loves a leper lover."
[...] We scoured the streets for lepers whenever we were out scavenging for salvage, but we never found one, not even among the supports of Everton Football Club.
But when leprosy finally arrived in our house in the form of scabies, Fr. Nolan was nowhere to be seen. [...] There was no Fr. Damian to come and make pots of tea for us and give us a hug.
[p. 26-27]
But Peg Leg Jones! Just get this. He was a great farter, a farter in a million. And this is important. All boys given the chance would like to be professional farters for it is a capacity to fart that gives a lad his first true sense of status. Before he becomes a member of the SAS or a paramilitary group with a cause that lines up with his adult psychosis, he must first start as a farter. I suspect that there are no exceptions. [...] There were some who could fart wetly or trump, as they say; others could pump as though whistling through gooseshit. And these few variations were all more or less noxious. But Peg Leg Jones could produce the vilest smells that ever you suffered. And his product, when he wished, was perfectly silent. It was in a register higher than humans could catch. Sometimes a dog would be found dead near a crossing, run over after pausing to decode Jones's high-register signal. I may be exaggerating but, when Jones let rip, it seemed that the green and cream paint on the walls at Saint Swithin's school would curdle and bubble and run a bit. But these details were as nothing to what followed. Our teacher, Miss Mallory, who had a long face, rather like a horse that has been baptised and can't conceal its glee, would in a split second be transformed. Now she would look like an Orangeman's horse, all tortured and filled with the agony of a true heretic; in a word, she would resemble a horse that had lost its faith. And there are few sadder sights than a faithless horse.
[p. 30-31]
I shall never forget the expression on my father's face as with scalded balls he tried to find the budgie in the coal scuttle. [...]
[...] In his solitary confinement at home, no words, looks or comfort, he turned all his unwanted affection towards a budgie. Unable to express his feelings for people, he was able, like most men, to sustain a very complex relationship with a pet. Lots of men in our street did the same. [...] On a Sunday, at two o'clock as the pubs closed, it was nothing to see nine men and their dogs in Indian file and all drunk. It was a terribly sad sight to see a drunken bulldog trying to lead his plastered owner back to lunch. [...]
[...] During lunch, my father would often put a whole roast potato in his mouth and then blow like a melancholy grampus, trying to cool it. This was an appalling sight, especially to my mother who had once worked as a chambermaid at the Exchange Hotel and thought she knew how the best people behaved at lunch. Her head would go down and she would reach for the carving knife. Knuckles white, she would struggle to control herself. [...]
After he'd finished his dinner and knowing how much he'd made my mother suffer, he would suddenly feel affectionate and get the budgie out of its cage. What a bloody palaver. My father had been given the budgie just after Christmas following Mam's fatwa and had called it Herod. [...] Anyway, after dinner Herod would hop from his cage and on to Dad's finger, then on to his shoulder while Dad, carrying his great mug of tea, got himself comfortable by the fire [...] So that the picture be clear, I must tell you that Dad liked his tea strong, very strong, and no sugar. He would lean forward and Herod, with all the agility in his genes, would hop from shoulder to biceps, to forearm and wrist and then, with the neatest little hop you ever saw, he'd hop on to the rim of Dad's mug of tea and sit there as innocent as could be. [...] And while Dad supped his tea noisily, and made a sound like pebbles being shovelled into a zinc wheelbarrow, my bother John parked his bike, opened the front door and -- how could he just let it go like that? He let the door go, and bang! It went off like the one o'clock gun, sending a column of air down the narrow passage between the front door and the kitchen where Herod was performing on the rim of me Dad's mug. The blast was too violent for a budgie to keep his feet and little Herod plunged head first into a big mug of very strong Lipton's tea.
Father, in reflexive terror, threw up both hands, thus allowing the scalding Lipton's to fall into his lap and souse his balls. But at least it got the budgie out of the tea. The falling mug jerked Herod with really quite a lot of force into the coal scuttle, which, half full of lack and nuts, didn't give him a soft landing. All this happened to quickly. From "Who's a pretty boy, eh?" to the flirting of Herod, to the arrival of my brother and the blast of air that pitched Dad's love into scalding tea and then into the blackness of the coal scuttle seemed a mere fraction of a second. I saw it all, from the torture of Dad's slurping to the bird's silly carry-on, to the catastrophe itself. And I saw my mother's face change from Deirdre of the Sorrows to a vision of bliss as the hated object of my father's affection fell to its doom. Well, not to its doom exactly, but it never spoke again, or flirted again, and certainly it never danced again. It seemed to lose all zest for life and not long after it seemed to volunteer itself to an easy-going cat we had, called Innocent, after a famous Pope, I believe.
[p. 45-48]
The resident priest, Fr. Jameson, had done the warm up and retired to the seat reserved for him at the left of the sanctuary. The pulpit was empty but lit interestingly by the candles. There was a profound silence. Then, as if from the other side of the universe, we heard the sound of dragging feet and stertorous breathing (some priests were fifty-a-day men, adultery experts favouring Sweet Afton, a popular Irish cigarette). And then came the chink of rosary beads. These noises came nearer -- the sound of terror for tonight as our man dragged himself up the steps of the pulpit. Two claw-like hands appeared over the edge of the pulpit and a terrifying Old Testament figure came into view. This was our appointment with fear and the old frightener up there was our very own answer to Valentine Dyall [a great radio actor of my childhood] the Man in Black with a cassock on and a huge crucifix tucked into his belt. He glanced down at us; we were seized with awe and shrank within ourselves. just the sight of him reminded us of how unworthy we were. His gaze swept over the whole congregation. This way and that he looked about, and all in silence. He rocked forward a little and then drew himself up to his full height. He towered over us like Ivan the Terrible and drew out the crucifix from his belt. Then holding it before him as if to bless us, he raised it up and, with the sudden strength for which prophets are famed, he spun round towards the altar and from his great height he hurled the crucifix across the altar rails! It landed on the marble floor with an amazing crash and slid at speed about ten feet before crashing into the credence table, rattling the cruets and nearly severing the table's legs. We were appalled. But our man slowly turned back to us and hissed, "And that's what you do every time you commit a sin against holy purity."
He then rapidly ran through the party line on chastity, how long a kiss could be sustained before it went from a venial sin to a mortal sin. The time was calculated from billiards, and the interval allowed was the duration of a canon shot, not long if you were a keen kisser.
[p. 51-52]
Once, just outside the kitchen where I had the honour of washing up the monastery porridge pot, I noticed to my amazement four clogs, which equalled two monks, and five rather shiny ankle-band shoes of the kind that my grandmother used to wear. What were two and a half grandmas doing near the kitchen? There was nobody I could ask and it remains a mystery to this day. [p. 63]
[...] I carried on reading from some daft old fool called Scaramelli. It was a tale about hermits who had sacrificed all for the love of God but who had remained attached to their crabs or cats or lice, I forget which, and so that after fifty years of mortification they had still finished up in hell. [p. 74]
The [army] cooks with their unassailable power despised us and did things to test our hunger. [...] Sausage like old cartridge cases and mashed potato the colour of abandoned plimsolls could not deaden our lust for something to eat. Once a man next to me found the handle of a radiator in his mashed potato; he said nothing, merely moving it to the side of his plate after sucking the mashed potato off it first. Nobody else said anything either. If the truth was known several of us were probably jealous. [p. 83-84]
Once as I stood to attention by my bed knowing that my lay-out was not all that good, I saw the CO frown and then glance toward the duty corporal. The corporal made a little gesture as if he was scratching the side of his head which he changed into a tapping of his temple. The CO spotted the reference to a half-wit and his frown became a beaming smile. "Good lay-out, soldier," he said, and went on with the inspection. Afterwards the word went out that I was some sort of hypnotist. [p. 85]
The audition took place in a beautiful library. There were about five elderly ladies sitting behind a long table and smiling; it was a frosty day and there was a distinct nip of Karvol in the air. In those days older ladies often splashed on the decongestants. Two of the ladies, a Miss Scorer and, I think, a Miss Scott were also sucking Fisherman's Friends; and with the radiators going at full blast the vapours of the cinnamon and pine oils were released into the atmosphere of the library with such intensity that they caught at my throat and brought tears to my eyes as I recited "Dover Beach". By the time I reached the line about "The long melancholy withdrawing roar", I was sobbing for lack of pure oxygen. The five ladies were deeply moved by my emotional power and so on the strength, the overpowering strength, of Karvol decongestant, I was accepted into the Rose Bruford College of Speech and Drama [...] [p. 100]
Waiting for a 136 bus from Highgate station to Muswell Hill Broadway on a misty evening in February is a bit like lurking outside the gates of purgatory. I stood there once; at the bus stop I mean, one nineteenth of a grey-faced crocodile of the depressed, all anxious to get away from each other and find comfort in their homes. The feeling in the queue was that the next 136 might come in about a fortnight's time. Resignation tinged with despair was in the air. Nobody spoke, a few shuffled and one man caused a near-ecstasy of excitement when he had a fit of coughing; but it soon passed and apathy returned as we all took root again. About a quarter of an hour passed, during which time several of the rooted queue glanced furtively at the man who'd coughed, as if in the desperate hope that he might cough again and thus suggest we were still alive. As these sly glanced darted about the Trappist line, something happened; an event took place. This event changed my life.
The fence to Highgate Woods lay to our right at a distance of about six feet. It was a beaten fence, a fence that looked as if it was made up of former queue members for the 136 bus who had waited in vain and finally weathered into knot-holed palings. Through a hole in this fence came an angel of change in the shape of a mongrel dog. No best in show this little fellow, oh no. He might have got his coat from an Oxfam shop, for it was without hint of lustre and had a whiff of other long-dead dogs. He gave me the impression of having once belonged to a taxidermist. What I mean is that there was something off about him. His ears didn't seem to match and might have been won in a raffle in, say, Kentish Town. They seemed unacquainted with each other. One stood up quite boldly and the other one was obviously a bit shy. But in his eyes there glowed the life force. Greyish brown and twinkling bright, speckled and flecked, and full of unquenchable optimism. A bit like Sir Ian McKellen, I suppose. Be that as it may, he wriggled through the broken palings and stopped short at the sight of us undead all in a line. But he wasn't daunted. He trotted down one side of the queue and up the other, wagging his tail and whimpering quietly to himself as if to say: "He must be here somewhere." He repeated this journey around the queue about three times, stopping here and there sniffing at a shoe or a trouser turn-up. As he came near to me I looked down at him and smiled beseechingly, hoping he would sniff at me and approve of my bouquet. But he didn't. He continued his quest elsewhere among us.
About four zombies along from me stood a pale, grey man with a tinge of blue to him. He could have passed for a ghost anywhere. There was not a single feature in him that leapt at you. Born to be in the Special Branch but as though even they had overlooked him, he was instantly appalled when the tail-wagging mongrel chose him. With a yelp of sudden adoration the dog looked up at the near-invisible man he had chosen, this revenant, and with a quite goatish leap he butted spy man just below the knee. Then he raced away and round the the queue and back to grey face and butted him again. The excitement caused the queue to tremble into life and people began to look toward the chosen one in curiosity. I was drowning in jealousy. Malice rose in me and I began to loathe the pale, blue-grey figure who had been preferred to me. Again the dog tore around the slightly trembling queue and again he stopped at shadow man, rose a little on his hind legs and butted him below the knee. Shadow man didn't want to be noticed. He shifted slightly, ignoring the giggles of delight that ran among us. Giggles of delight. We had been brought back from the dead by a mongrel dog. One of us had been chosen for God knows what mysterious reason and it wasn't me. Twice more the ceremony was repeated and the giggles turned to laughter, healthy laughter; a girl smiled at the man next to her. Our saviour seemed to sense our rebirth and did another circuit. As he arrived at the feet of the drab bastard he'd selected, a huge truck roared towards our bus stop. The darling dog arched his back and attempted his knee-butting act of homage. The grey man shifted again and more nimbly than you'd have thought possible, he kicked sideways and caught our life-giving dog on the side of his mouth. With a yelp of amazement he leapt away from this kick and back into the road right in the path of the great truck and disappeared between the wheels of an Ernest Roderick Foden. A gasp of horror burst from us all as our miracle maker disappeared under the truck. In a second the lorry was past and there, looking quite amazed, but still smiling, was our God. I mean our Dog. And do you know what? He rushed with delight to the swivel-eyed git who'd kicked him, and arching his back he butted him affectionately again as if to say: "You didn't mean that did you?" And he circled us one more time before dashing through the hole in the fence and disappearing back into Highgate Woods as the 136 came to carry us all away.
I didn't get on the bus with the others. I decided to walk down to the Broadway. Some of my meanness evaporated and I felt at one with that dog. "I don't care who kicks me in the lip," I thought, "I'll go on and do what is necessary."
[p. 129-131]
So off I went to York to try my luck. But my luck was out, I was a disaster. That was what the other actors thought but the audience seemed to like me and that's the main thing isn't it? They particularly liked it when I shook my head and disappeared in a shower of talcum powder. So you can guess what sort of a performance I gave: a real headshaker. When you can't act, shake the talc. Many a performance has been saved by talc or a slipping toupee. I once did the talc and wore squeaky shoes.
When I look over my shoulder into my past, I mostly see flops or even disasters. I have seen plays that were so bad I would have paid a small sum to be in them. [...]
[p. 145]
[..] There were fight scenes to be prepared and bird-handling scenes too. The budget was big enough in those days to include six mighty hawks and their handlers. [...] The hawk would rise up and flutter like a bloody great eagle, all the while shitting over me as if he'd been on curry all night. [...] The play was pretty well received and I got a few laughs during the fight scenes as I skidded about a bit in hawk shit. Anyway I survived it. Joan Plowright, playing a wonderful woman, had to do a very old-style death scene surrounded by her extended family. As her brother Sir Francis Acton I had to lead the grieving gang. As we all knelt around the deathbed muttering the paternoster, we began to vary the prayer to tease Anthony Hopkins. For some reason we started to say in guttural tones, "Edward Woodward, Edward Woodward who art in Heaven". This was all very silly but it amused those of us not playing very big parts and made life hard for Hopkins, because the dying Joan Plowright was supposed to be his wife. [...]
[p. 177-179]
Michael Wisher, who can seriously be described as the creator of the character Davros, used to work with a kilt on and paper bag over his head to maintain his feel for the part. [Davros, for those who don't remember, wore an ugly mask (which Michael couldn't see through) and had no legs]. He took his work so seriously that he would not remove the bag even at coffee break. To see coffee and biscuits being pushed under the paper bag, followed by a cigarette, while the bag continued to express the most passionate views on how Davros felt about things was just bliss. He did allow us to make a hole in the top of his bag so that the smoke could escape. [p. 205]
Douglas had plenty of bottle and wasn't at all anxious that the Zygon computers looked like abandoned pizzas. [p. 207]
During the shooting of "Planet of Evil" [...] There was a scene in which I had to seize some poor alien and threaten to kill him with a knife in order to persuade his comrades to reveal their leader to me. It was a very ordinary little scene; so ordinary that I hadn't really read it properly. When the knife was offered to me I felt suddenly impatient and then disgusted with the idea of using such a course threat in our lovely programme. The line I was to say ran, "Take me to your leader or I'll kill him with this knife". Yes, I think it was as plonking as that. So I refused to say it. We had very little time left on our final day of filming to get this scene in the can and my refusal caused a problem for David Maloney, the director. In Philip's absence he had to log the scene I was causing about my lines. I didn't really care. David and I were very friendly colleagues and he knew I was not just being difficult. But, without the producer there, who could take responsibility for the change? Me, of course.
We rolled the cameras and, as written, I grabbed some pitiful little native of Zeta Minor, pulled him close, and said: "Take me to your leader or I'll kill him with this deadly jelly baby." When the other little Zetas agreed to comply, I bit the head off the jelly baby (orange was my favourite) and I think I offered the rest of it to the captured Zeta. [...]
When at last the episode aired, the children loved the scene and realized that I was bluffing the Zetas who wouldn't know a jelly baby from a kangaroo. It made just as much or as little sense as a knife.
[...] All this happened in October 1975. A few weeks ago, in a bookshop in Manchester, a child of about ten offered me a jelly baby. He was happy when I laughed, then he quoted my line, and it was my turn to be happy.
[p. 207-209]
At one time I toyed with the idea of suggesting that Doctor Who and K9, with John Leeson in vision, should take over the Open University. I'd seen some Open University stuff and thought it was so turgid we could do it better. It even flashed through my mind that perhaps we could take over the whole National Education program in Whitehall. But I stayed schtum in case they locked me up. [p. 218]
To be a children's hero was my supreme pleasure and pride. "Don't talk to strange men," did not apply to me. In any family where there were children I was welcome. In the park I could buy the ice cream and goodies and they would sit by me on the park bench and laugh, and when an anxious mother came rushing up to find out who this man was in the Burberry coat and fright wig, as they thought of my hair, the children would become embarrassed and mutter, "Go away, Mum, it's Doctor Who."
[...] I always sat down if I could for the children were always a bit alarmed at my height.
Once, walking along Westbourne Grove I was surrounded by a group of ecstatic children and for ten minutes or so I entertained them and their teacher. As they went off, chortling with pleasure and waving affectionately to me, I noticed a young Greek shopkeeper watching me. As I turned to go on my way he said, "Everybody knows you, Doctor, and I was thinking as I watched you with those children, who knows me? Who knows Dimitri? When I walk down the street nobody knows Dimitri, no children hold out their arms to me." And he was right and I shall never forget it. Once I was a hero.
The students at St Andrew's University wanted me to put my name forward as Rector. The ultimate expression of student power was to appoint a fiction to the governing body. But I turned them down when I discovered that I was not the first choice. By universal acclamation Basil Brush was announced as their first selection. He was my hero, too.
[p. 224-225]
Conan, who originally came from Yorkshire, was so poor as a child that his father had great difficulty affording the fare for the little family holiday to London he liked to organize every year. One year he discovered that it was cheaper to catch a cargo boat from Hull and sail with the entire family to Norway. They would then disembark at Oslo, catch another boat sailing to Tilbury, London, where they would catch a tram to Camden Town and have a few days' excitement in town. They say that it is still cheaper to do the same trip nowadays.
[p. 236]
At London airport somebody met me and, true enough, the ticket was first class and I was reassured; the part might be paltry but the ticket was great, and that's important to a fellow who isn't sure of himself. People may say it's a first-class script, but what I want to know is, is it a first-class ticket? I always read the ticket before the script and, usually, the ticket is more dramatic. Sometimes I have done scripts that are less dramatic than ironing a shirt.
[p. 251]
"Anyway, where's my dinner?" he asked the stewardess as she turned away from serving Hunt.
"You said you didn't want any dinner, sir," she said quietly.
"I didn't hear me say that," said Joe. And the rather ominously and with great politeness he said: "May I please have something to eat, young lady" She went off and Joe slumped back in his seat and wearily lit a cigarette and mumbled something to Hunt who seemed very cheery and was eating happily. The stewardess appeared with a portion of foie gras and rather frostily offered it to the now dozing Joe. He looked up at her with incomprehension, saw the round of foie gras on the plate, and thinking it was an ashtray, he muttered, "Why thank you," and stubbed out his cigarette in the foie gras. I shall never forget the look on that girl's face. [...]
[p. 252-253]

From My Name Escapes Me - The Diary of a Retiring Actor by Alec Guinness (Penguin, 1996):

When we got back to the hotel there was a telephone message from the Crane Kalman Gallery inviting [Merula] to contribute half a dozen pictures to the mixed show they are having in mid-February: a big morale booster. We ordered Buck's Fizz to celebrate. It had the look and scent of mimosa in Portugal in the early spring. -- 18 January 1995
The sky is cloudless, the wind cold, the crocuses have flopped over and the future of the daffodils looks doubtful. The ground is so wet that every step is a squelch. Moss appears to be replacing grass but there is a definite feel of spring in the air; which brings to mind an old song of Douggie Byng's. -- 21 Feb 1995
"What do you want to be when you grow up, Billy?"
"I hope to be an actor."
"But, Billy, actors don't grow up. And you, Lancelot?"
"A drama critic."
"Really? That's unusual. I hope you won't find it a bore after a year or two. And you, Penelope, if you ever grow up?"
"I'm going to be a director, a director, a director."
"You always were a chatterbox, Penelope. Not one of you has said you want to be a playwright. How sad. All of you wish to put the cart before the horse."
-- 26 February 1995
Yesterday evening we watched Miriam Rothschild on BBC 2's "Seven Wonders of the World" series and thought she was terrific - entertaining, vital and astonishing. But the programme was all too short - half an hour. I want it repeated, enlarged and for her to give hours more of her knowledge and wisdom. I want to know more (or at least I think I do) about the microscopic pond creature that can disappear up its own fundament; about the remarkable hopping of fleas; and about carotenoids, colour, light and sight. [...] -- 23 March 1995
[...] Not much hype in 1957 when The Bridge on the River Kwai brought me an Oscar but the let-down was there sure enough. It was the Daily Express, I think, which carried a banner headline which read, "Deborah Kerr fails for the third time". A very English assessment. She hadn't failed in any real sense (she had several beautiful performances to her credit) - she just hadn't been handed a trophy. A race or fight or game can be won but to call something "the best" in the arts is absurd. I wouldn't mind betting Dickens would fail to win the Booker Prize (too readable and too funny) and Turner the Turner Prize and poor Keats wouldn't even be considered for any poetry prize. And so on. I suggest that givers of awards to actors, writers and artists should choose half a dozen, almost at random, and say, "These are people we wish to honour - equally".
Geoffrey Madan, in his Notebooks, quotes a Canon Liddon as follows: "The applause of all but very good men is no more than the precise measure of their possible hostility".
-- 28 March 1995
On Friday I was offered another voice-over; this time for the Euro Tunnel. It so happens that two weeks ago I booked three first-class tickets to Paris for 2 May. I was told that our Senior Citizen rail cards would knock £90 off each ticket. Lovely. But not so, it appears. This Friday I was informed that the train had its full quota of Senior Citizens for the day I am travelling. This is the first I've heard of such a quota. Will it soon apply to our Inter-City routes? I'm not doing the voice-over: though I would do so happily if they would allow me to warn other elderly travellers of this let-down. -- 1 April 1995
Much of the day I have busied myself making notes on the small parts in Shakespeare, often nameless, which are rewarding to the actor if only he'll not dismiss them as beneath his dignity. If I can work it up into a talk I might call it, "Only a cough and a spit" - the phrase so often used by actors to explain away a lack of opportunity. -- 27 May 1995
Last night watched TV programme (put together by Terry Pratchett) on orang-utans in Borneo. It contained a remarkable few minutes of a huge male orang-utan, which had a face like a flat oriental mask, walking - red hair rippling - with a deliberate, undulating, unstoppable movement toward the camera. The it sat down and contemplated us. I shouldn't have used the words "which" or "it", but "who" and "he". He was a God of the Rain Forest with a mesmeric personality. It was the most impressive thing I've seen on the box this year; always excepting Miriam Rothschild's half-hour in March.
Must have my eyes tested. Today I found myself making enticing cooing sounds to what I took to be a rather pale pigeon on the lawn outside my study. It turned out to be a knuckle-bone left by one of the dogs.
-- 13 June 1995
A vast balloon hummed its way towards the house as we were finishing dinner. It looked as if it were going to land in an adjacent field. The dogs went wild with excitement, leaping in the air as if to take a bite out of it, but the balloon slowly rose over a hedge, fancy free, and disappeared from sight. Dido, out border terrier, returned to us with triumph written all over her, well satisfied that she had seen off a giant and seeking our grateful praise. And a biscuit. -- 28 July 1995
Finished Trollope's The American Senator. The opening chapters are a bit wearily confusing but one he has got thoroughly underway it is enthralling. Arabella Trefoil is a great creation and for sheer awfulness matches Sylvia Tietjens in Ford Maddox Ford's Parade's End. I've come across her several times, in various disguises but always recognizable, in London, Paris, Cairo and New York - but she lives mostly in Sussex. -- 4 September 1995
A smiling, pleasant chap, probably in his thirties, accosted me near the station with, "Could I have your autograph?" He proffered paper and biro. I was graciousness itself and wrote, "Good wishes" followed by my name. "Thanks ever so," he said. "My granny will be thrilled." -- 18 September 1995
Back at the hotel I tried to get out of a lift as Eric Ambler was trying to get in. We had exactly the same encounter about three weeks ago. What is Providence trying to tell us? We nattered together for five minutes, verbally comparing failing eyesight and creaking limbs, sharing resentment - or maybe envy - at mutual friends who have boldly gone ahead. [...] -- 5 October 1995
In early evening to a friend's flat where I made my long overdue confession to a holy and illuminating priest. It was a memorable experience which gently sponged away all my recent irascibility, anxieties and spiritual turmoil. Perhaps kneeling at a dining-room table is more relaxing than the upright coffin of an elaborately carved confessional. It would be good to think that from now on I shall spread only sweetness, light and understanding, but I fear I know myself too well. The bad habits of a lifetime, when tackled head on, seem only to bend, not break. -- 22 November 1995
[...] The dear people (the McCutcheons) who run the Harrow Inn, a few hundred yards up from us, sent up a vast, excellent steak and kidney pie. [Merula] never makes pastry so I hadn't seen one of those porcelain chimneys poking through the crust for many years. It looked to me remarkably like the chimneys you see sticking out of the half-buried troglodyte houses in Murcia, in southern Spain. -- 11 December 1995
Today I have felt querulous. Behaviour has been spiky; largely due, I think, to our affable postman dutifully pushing piles of junk mail through the letter-box daily. It gets worse near Christmas. The rubbish, the charity appeals (often in duplicate) and, worst of all, the photographs from Star Wars demanding autographs. They mostly come from America and as often as not enclose a stamped address envelope - the stamps, being US stamps, are useless here. The English usually make their demand without photograph, envelope, stamp or money. The nation has got acclimatized to asking something for nothing. Bills in the post are welcome by comparison. It's mean and hard of me but from 1 January 1996 I am resolved to throw it all in the waste bin unopened (bills excepted, of course); I no longer have the energy to assist teenagers in their idiotic, albeit lucrative, hobby. -- 16 December 1995
[...] a Super Color Pen [...] which advertises that it contains no xylene. What on earth is xylene? It could be a useful Scrabble word. -- 18 December 1995
[...] The past eight weeks have been a strain, so I decided to comfort myself with a Christmas present and went to Mr Blumlein's excellent CD shop in Petersfield, where I treated myself to some Mozart, Shostakovich, Nielsen, Saint-Saëns and Medtner. The last was a mistake - he goes on too long, like an after-dinner speaking with a few good anecdotes but who doesn't know when to stop. -- 20 December 1995
A pleasing letter this morning from Miriam Rothschild saying that if we encounter each other this year (which I very much hope we may) she will tell me a romantic story about worms. Also she will bring me up to date on the minute creature that lives under the eyelids of the hippopotamus and feeds on its tears. Can't wait. [...] -- 3 January 1996
Epiphany and Twelfth Night. This used to be a great party-giving night, particularly in some theatre circles. Perhaps it still is. Down here there are only Merula, Alan B and me to celebrate by doing nothing. The best 12th Nt parties I ever attended were given by Richard Leech and his family - a fairly violent but joyful playing of indoor games. One of the silliest and most intimate of games was the race between two teams passing an orange, held under the chin, from one chin to the next. In those days I had a sort of part-time secretary, a jolly lady who undoubtably had more than one chin. I fear she was a liability to whichever team had the good nature and misfortune to choose her. -- 6 January 1996
"The bawdy hand of the dial is now upon the prick of noon" - but no sign of our expected but unknown guest, who is half an hour late. It is hoped that he may arrange a small exhibition of Merula's paintings and/or wool pictures. He is probably lost in the narrow roads under the Hangers; unless he is taking a short rest, as is now obligatory by a Brussels ruling for shellfish travelling more than thirty-five miles. [...] -- 29 January 1996
Last night we watched, aghast, a TV programme about American mothers training their tiny-tot little girls in the arts of seduction for a glitzy appearance at the Southern Charm Pageant in Atlanta, Georgia. As rabid "stage mothers" they made our own appalling breed of ambitious mums seem only partially insane. I think the five-year-old winner, crowned in a tinselly way, was hailed as "Queen of Queens". I dread to think of her future. -- 1 February 1996
I seems an impertinence, when pushing eighty-two, to deliberately associate with people a lot younger than oneself, feeling that possibly one might interest or entertain them. Of course it isn't quite that: secretly one hopes and longs to draw on the vitality and brightness of the young, and above all to be able to join in their laughter. How is one to grasp the all-pervasiveness of time? Somewhere Einstein wrote, "The distinction between past, present and future is only an illusion, however persistent." Any comment from me would be a gem for Pseuds' Corner [a column in Private Eye magazine quoting examples of pretentious nonsense]. But how does Einstein's statement compare with St Augustine, who quoted, with admiration, an old man he knew? - "Time comes from the future, which does not yet exist, into the present, which has no duration, and goes on into the past, which has ceased to exist." -- 5 February 1996
I had long letter this morning from the painter Keith Grant, who has just returned from one of his regular visits to Norway. When we first me, early last year, I told him I longed to see again Aurora Borealis. His description of what he saw this winter in the Artic Circle is so good I hope he will allow me to quote it in full. Here it is:
The most dramatic display was on Christmas Eve. I was driving between two small towns about half an hour apart. Suddenly the sky to the east began to glow, a huge fan of green bluish light rose almost to zenith with mysterious dark patches of strange and irregular shapes within it. These were clouds in silhouette. The fan of light broke up into vertical shafts of light extending upwards from the horizon great height. The began to ripple and change position and then separated into so many hanging curtains receding and diminishing in size to give the most awesome perspective expression of deep space. From this area in the east the whole heavens became a vast dome of hanging silken banners and flags. The movement of the ribbons of light was unnerving. It was as if some conscious agency was causing the waves and ripples of lights, constantly shifting position so the no effect could be memorized, since it was eclipsed by a more and more stunning pageantry.
A great loop of light appeared and then seemed to descend towards me, only to rise and shrink with such rapidity I wondered if I had seen or imagined it.
Suddenly it was over, a few fitful flashes here and there, and then the darkness and intense cold through which the stars (which I could see through the aurora), now no longer in competition with the northern lights, shone in diamond-like brilliance. A Norwegian girl said to me that when one sees the Aurora like this - "It is like nature's benediction". Wonderful, wonderful. I have seen so many displays recently that I am satisfied.
-- 10 February 1996
No one can feel much like singing today, except, perhaps, some Irish terrorists and their subterranean supporters. There is a melancholy feel in the air, a weary "I have been here before" attitude; the hopes of the past eighteen months irreparably dented, I fear.
I remember an English priest saying to me, years ago, "I am sick of Irishmen coming to the confessional with the works of St John of the Cross in one pocket and a gun in the other."
And now to Mass. There will be prayers for peace and justice as always. It's the interpretation of justice the causes the greatest difficulty.
-- 11 February 1996
[...] That was in 1961, when I was making a film called A Majority of One. (I don't think I ever saw more than about ten minutes of it. It was Penelope Gilliatt, I think, who described my make-up as a Japanese business gent as me with ravioli stuck on my eyelids. That was about the only thing about the whole enterprise that made me laugh.) -- 14 February 1996
A query from my agent this morning wanting to know if I would be interested in playing Firs in a film of [Checkhov's play] The Cherry Orchard in Germany [...]
The best Firs I have seen was the Russian actor Alexi Gribov who was in the Moscow Arts Company when it came to London in the early fifties. He was a great actor, played three parts here and made a critical success in all of them. When interviewed by the press he gave a classic reply to the perennial question, "Which is your favourite of all the parts you play?" Gribov replied, sotto voce, "I can't tell you that because, you see, it would make the other parts jealous." A very true observation.
-- 1 March 1996
[...] In [Dame Muriel Spark's] tribute to Graham [Greene] she spoke of the financial help he gave her when she was a struggling writer. She said, "It was typical of Graham that with the monthly cheques he often sent a few bottles of red wine to 'take the edge off cold charity'." It says something very pleasing about both of them. -- 2 March 1996
Got my hearing-aids [...] They have minute antennae, or so I supposed them to be, as if belonging to dwarf Martians, but they are really little lavatory chains to pull the things out. [...] -- 4 March 1996
When I got home I had a short rest and then inserted the hearing-aids [...] and put on a CD of Mozart violin sonatas. I had no idea Mozart could be so shrill. It wasn't uncomfortable or unpleasant, just surprising. Water from taps in a hand-basin had something in common with Niagara, tearing a piece of paper suggested being struck by lightning and the sound of my feet walking across the wooden floor in our living-room was as brash and insistent as flamenco dancing. What a lot I have been missing during the past two or three years. It's all quite refreshing. I am pretty sure sound isn't actually like what I now hear, but what I hear is amusingly new and I think I can live with it. -- 6 March 1996
Merula's sister Chattie came for the day and night and an old actor/painter friend of theirs, Ole Pooley arrived for lunch, so conversation was more or less confined to reminiscences. Ole is a week or two older than me, lives in LA, still plays vigorous tennis, swims a lot, walks a lot and obviously has all his marbles. I felt a bit put out. -- 24 March 1996
The [Pope's Easter] Mass was to start at 10:30. [...] We were courteously shown to our red plush chairs in the front row, surrounded by ambassadors with their wives in black lace mantillas. As we turned up our raincoat collars against the bitter wind and settled down the heavens opened. [...] we were soaked to the skin and our teeth were chattering [...] And then His Holiness appeared.
We all stood and tried, in the Italian fashion, to clap our wet hands. He walked slowly and steadily to the altar under its vast canopy. At the appropriate moment we sat again on our red plush chairs. The sensation was that of sitting in a chilled, sodden summer pudding. -- 8 April 1996
[...] All the time I have worked in films I have been painstakingly good at 'hitting my marks' on the studio floor in an effort to satisfy directors and technicians, and I have also made an effort, when repeating a scene, to make it an exact replica of the previous 'take'. Jeanne [Moreau] demonstrated that such exactitude was deadening. Watching her filming I knew she was right; every 'take' was slightly different and every one was spontaneous and fresh. If I had been freed of my self-imposed strait-jacket three decades ago I might - who knows? - I might have taken off and been a sort of star; I saw a few actors cease to be real people when they succeeded and some of those who failed became ingrained with bitterness. And some of the good ones who made it to the top didn't know how to cope with their success and reached for the bottle. Updike's In the Beauty of the Lilies gives a full-length, devastating portrait of a Hollywoodized human being. No thank you. -- 15 April 1996
[...] a passage I read yesterday in Admiral Lord Cochrane's autobiography, written in 1859.
Cochrane, as a midshipman, served during the Napoleonic wars in a frigate in Norwegian waters. They had on board a parrot which nearly drove the first lieutenant mad, as it imitated exactly the bosun's whistle and was endlessly piping out contradictory orders, which were immediately obeyed by the men. On one occasion, in return for hospitality ashore, the officers invited a party of Norwegian townspeople aboard. A 'chair' was rigged to hoist them up the ship's side. A lady was in mid-air when the parrot piped "Let her go!", which the sailors did and the poor woman had to be saved from drowning. -- 16 April 1996
[Shakespeare, in Henry V, has a brief phrase, "Old men forget".] It is horribly true, as every old person knows, but what would be even more disturbing would be "Old men remember!", for once they started remembering how the hell do you put a stop to them? And by "them" I mean me. -- 25 April 1996
One of the depressing things about arriving in a fifth-rate hotel is the knowledge that you are going to find bent wire coat-hangers jangling in a rickety wardrobe. The hangers will barely have the strength to support a shirt, let alone a suit. A far cry from that to the way-up-market De Vere Grand Hotel at Eastbourne where decently shaped wooden coat-hangers are plentifully supplied, but they are of the kind which have a solid nail through the top instead of a hook. You go fishing in the air for minutes, holding up the weight of your clothes, while trying to make a satisfactory connection with the little metal contraption which should take the head of the nail. I suppose, from the hotel's point of view, this discourages petty thieving. I would rather do without all the posh little knick-knacks on offer in the glossy bathrooms and see the money saved do on old-fashioned coat-hangers.
[...] My eye fell on a couple of bowls of what I took to be cocktail nibbles and I proffered these around. They turned out to be bowls of pot-pourri. -- 28 April 1996
Stacking away some old newspapers for recycling, my eye fell on something which I instantly recognized - my own name. It occurred in a review of an American book about the paranormal. It simply said, "Alec Guinness possesses second sight." News to me. -- 16 May 1996
Dido saw off a pretty fox cub but didn't pursue. She is now curled up in front of the fire, looking like an ammonite. -- 17 May 1996
I have only seen The Master Builder once, when Ralph [Richardson], Peggy [Ashcroft] and Wendy Hiller did it at the National. Larry Olivier and I went together. [...] At the end of the performance Larry and I went backstage. When we were leaving his dressing room, Ralph suggested his dresser should show us the way out. Larry declined, saying, "You forget, old thing, that I was responsible for this theatre. I know every brick in it." He beckoned me and away we went. Some twenty minutes later we found ourselves in a vast, damp, dripping, ill-lit area under the Thames. Our shouts echoed meaninglessly. A search party picked up the sounds and rescued us. It was a long evening. -- 21 May 1996

From The Seven Ordeals of Count Cagliostro by Iain McCalman (Flamingo, 2003):

The next day Jeanne was exultant; within a few days she told Beugnot that she no longer needed his services as lawyer or lover. With the cardinal as her "protector," she would try a new plan. She'd locate herself in Versailles, fourteen miles southwest of Paris, and lobby the court directly for restoration of her Valois titles and lands. Poor discarded Beugnot warned her to be careful: Versailles was infested with swindlers and professional intrigants, "always on the verge of making a fortune, always glib with dangerous advice about how to go about things which should not be done."
[§ 4 Copt, p. 155-156]
The following year, around the time Giuseppe Balsamo was scooting from Palermo just ahead of the police, twenty-four-year-old Charles Théveneau was making a similarly motivated flight across the Channel to join London's émigré underground. [...] The outlaws within this urban badlands included bankers fleeing from swindled clients, army officers absconding with regimental funds, and priests evading sexual charges. Most prolific of all, however, were writers ducking France's book licensing and censorship laws. [...] Here Charles Théveneau had found his natural habitat: he invented for himself the noble lineage of "de Morande" and perfected the art of writing viciously pornographic tracts called libelles. [...]
Soon, though, he'd begun to stand out from the Grub Street pack (which included Parkyns Macmahon, who would become Cagliostro's English biographer). De Morande gave his first London publication the apt title Le philosophe cynique (1771); its success spawned a more ambitious work called Le gazetier cuirassé that became a byword for nastiness throughout the francophone world. De Morande's wit, savagery, and wide network of informants made the journal unusually lethal. A contemporary English print showed a victim decapitated by the editor's pen while nests of vipers writhed among the pages. Brissot de Warville, a former hack himself, neatly described its mode of operation: "The victim pays to have his name kept out, his enemy pays to get it put in again; the law protects everything and the public does nothing but laugh."
A few of de Morande's early victims of blackmail didn't actually play by these rules. Théveneau earned a literary thrashing from Voltaire, a horsewhipping from the count de Laureguais, and a challenge from the deadly swordsman Chevalier d'Eon. But no one could deny his stamina: he eventually hit a vein of gold in 1774 by threatening to publish a pornographic biography of Louis XV's mistress Madame du Barry [...] At first, Louis tried to silence this gadfly by sending a gang of undercover French police to London to kidnap him, but de Morande incited the patriotic local crowd to heave the policemen into the Thames. Defeated, Louis sent over a gentler negotiator, the writer-playwright Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais. Posing under the name Ronac, Beaumarchais devised a settlement that gave de Morande the huge sum of 32,000 livres (and a lifetime pension of 4,000 livres per year), provided that he withdraw the publication and stop writing against the French crown.
This didn't deter de Morande from smearing other dignitaries; his libelles made him one of France's five best-selling writers during the last years of the old regime. In 1784 he became editor of the Courier de l'Europe and his poisonous tentacles began to extend to other parts of Europe as well. Within Britain, his skill at flattering or blackmailing the middle echelons of both the government and the opposition made him one of the best-informed men in politics. [...]
[§ 5 Prophet, p. 192-194]
Typically, Cagliostro chose to fight on unconventional terrain. One of de Morande's early installments had ridiculed the Copt's claim to be able to kill lions by baiting them with live animals reared on arsenic. Convinced that his enemy was gutless, Cagliostro decided to use the same tactics that had crushed Empress Catherine's physician five years before. He challenged de Morande to a special kind of duel:
I am going, mister jester, to make a joke at your expense. In matters of physics and chemistry, arguments prove very little, persiflage proves nothing; experiment is everything. Allow me, then, to propose a little experiment that will entertain the public, at either your expense or at mine. I invite you to eat with me on November 9, at 9 o'clock in the morning. You will provide the wine and all the accessories; I will furnish only a dish done in my way; it will be a little sucking piglet, fattened according to my method. Two hours before the dinner, I will present it to you alive and well, you will be responsible for killing and preparing it and I will not come near it until the moment when it is served on the table. You will cut it into four equal parts, you may serve me the part that you judge to be suitable. The day after this dinner, one of four things will happen: either we will both be dead, or neither of us will be dead; or I will be dead and you will not; or you will be dead and I will not. Of these four chances I will give you three and bet you 5,000 guineas that the day after the meal you will be dead and I will be well. Cagliostro's challenge appeared in the Public Advertizer of 5 September, and de Morande's reply was uncharacteristically feeble. He refused a duel, he said, because he didn't want Cagliostro's death on his conscience. However, if the arsenic experiment could be performed on a cat or a dog, he'd be pleased to try it. Cagliostro had scored a sharp blow against a man already notorious for cowardice, and he pressed his advantage home on 9 September. He replied that a cat or dog would be too superior to stand in for a beast like de Morande. Moreover, "It is not your representative but it is you that I wish to dispatch."
Unfortunately for Cagliostro, de Morande was both smarter and had better resources than dour Dr. Roggerson. The French pressman had the cunning of a weasel, a bankroll from the Bourbons, and a brand of poison in his pen for which the Copt had no antidote. His initial response to Cagliostro's jeers was to trawl minutely through the publications of the Copt's growing number of European critics. As a seasoned gutter journalist, de Morande knew that the brazen repetition of lies was as good as the truth. [...]
[§ 5 Prophet, p. 206-207]

	This page last changed: 16 Aug 2011
[Validate HTML]

Donate free
food & land

Feedback by email
or Web form