Victor England, the great film director, returns to Hollywood to finalise arrangements for his next production. Everything seems propitious: he has a firm contract with a studio that owes him a substantial debt of gratitude and whose top executives are top friends of his. Why, then, is he left to languish in the grand hotel owned by Verdugo, which in Spanish means executioner? What is the relationship between Victor, who can write equally well with left hand or right, and Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, about whom he once made a film, a film which is showing on TV as he enters his suite? Who is the...
Victor England, the great film director, returns to Hollywood to finalise arrangements for his next production. Everything seems propitious: he has...
Frederic Raphael, the English novelist, screenwriter, and man of letters, and Joseph Epstein, the American essayist, short-story writer, and literary critic, exchanged e-mails sporadically over the years, usually commenting on each other's various writings. Then one day in 2009, Raphael wrote to Epstein to suggest that, since they enjoyed a benevolence toward each other unusual among literary men, they begin an exchange of e-mail correspondence on a regular basis. His thought was that, at the end of a year or so, the result might be an interesting book. Epstein, who had long admired Raphael's...
Frederic Raphael, the English novelist, screenwriter, and man of letters, and Joseph Epstein, the American essayist, short-story writer, and literary ...
It is the early 1950s. Lionel Spote, a young London publisher, has just discovered that he has inherited a Scottish estate. He is also a rather bemused devotee of the couch - the psychiatric one. Full to the brim with misgivings and uncertainty, he arrives in the far north to discover that his newly-acquired property 'marches' alongside that of a formidable woman, April Gunter-Sykes, who is staring-eyed and direct -- bluntly peculiar. It must be said that April's elusive daughter Laura seems far more appealing. He also meets Sir Duncan Fidge, the local MP, an ebullient storm of a...
It is the early 1950s. Lionel Spote, a young London publisher, has just discovered that he has inherited a Scottish estate. He is also a rather bem...
