Fear and Loathing in Fitzrovia

Fear and Loathing in Fitzrovia PDF Author: Paul Willetts
Publisher: Dewi Lewis Publishing
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 420

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Book Description
Born in London in 1912, the youngest child of a Cuban father and an Anglo-Indian mother, Julian Maclaren-Ross led a bizarre and chaotic life, living at one time or another as a vacuuum-cleaner salesman, an author, screenwriter, army deserter, alcoholic, drug-addict, stalker and Soho stalwart. Since his death, his place in literary history has been secured by the acclaimed posthumous publication of Memoirs of the Forties, and he has been memorialised as X. Trapnel in Anthony Powell's celebrated A Dance to the Music of Time. This is his first full and authorised biography.

Fear and Loathing in Fitzrovia

Fear and Loathing in Fitzrovia PDF Author: Paul Willetts
Publisher: Dewi Lewis Publishing
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 420

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Book Description
Born in London in 1912, the youngest child of a Cuban father and an Anglo-Indian mother, Julian Maclaren-Ross led a bizarre and chaotic life, living at one time or another as a vacuuum-cleaner salesman, an author, screenwriter, army deserter, alcoholic, drug-addict, stalker and Soho stalwart. Since his death, his place in literary history has been secured by the acclaimed posthumous publication of Memoirs of the Forties, and he has been memorialised as X. Trapnel in Anthony Powell's celebrated A Dance to the Music of Time. This is his first full and authorised biography.

Julian Maclaren-Ross

Julian Maclaren-Ross PDF Author: Julian Maclaren-Ross
Publisher: Dewi Lewis Publishing
ISBN:
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 260

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Book Description
No writer has led as bizarre and eventful a life as the once celebrated Soho dandy Julian Maclaren Ross. In the course of 52 hectic years he endured homelessness, alcoholism, drug addiction and near insanity. The world of Maclaren-Ross's writing tends to be the dingy, down-at-heel world of smoked veiled bars, blacked-out streets and rented lodgings, and first-hand experience lends unmistakable literary logo. He is a truly important writer who can count Evelyn Waugh, Harold Pinter, Graham Greene and John Betjeman among his fans.

Of Love and Hunger

Of Love and Hunger PDF Author: Julian Maclaren-Ross
Publisher: Penguin Classics
ISBN:
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 232

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Book Description
This grimly amusing novel of the Depression is based on the author's experiences as a vacuum-cleaner salesman. The narrator, a journalist, returns from India and is forced to take a dead-end job to make ends meet; a happy ending follows his path through scams, affairs and redundancy.

Down and Out in Paris and London

Down and Out in Paris and London PDF Author: George Orwell
Publisher: A G Printing & Publishing
ISBN:
Category : Comics & Graphic Novels
Languages : en
Pages : 254

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Book Description
There were eccentric characters in the hotel. The Paris slums are a gathering-place for eccentric people—people who have fallen into solitary, half-mad grooves of life and given up trying to be normal or decent. Poverty frees them from ordinary standards of behaviour, just as money frees people from work. Some of the lodgers in our hotel lived lives that were curious beyond words. There were the Rougiers, for instance, an old, ragged, dwarfish couple who plied an extraordinary trade. They used to sell postcards on the Boulevard St Michel. The curious thing was that the postcards were sold in sealed packets as pornographic ones, but were actually photographs of chateaux on the Loire; the buyers did not discover this till too late, and of course never complained. The Rougiers earned about a hundred francs a week, and by strict economy managed to be always half starved and half drunk. The filth of their room was such that one could smell it on the floor below. According to Madame F., neither of the Rougiers had taken off their clothes for four years.

Memoirs of the Forties

Memoirs of the Forties PDF Author: Julian Maclaren-Ross
Publisher: Orbit Books
ISBN: 9780747407652
Category : London (England)
Languages : en
Pages : 348

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Book Description
In these memoirs the author evokes an era of incendiary bombs and rationing and assembles a cast including Dylan Thomas, Graham Greene, Cyril Connolly, Nina Hamnett and Woodrow Wyatt. The book also contains six of Maclaren-Ross' wartime stories.

The Look of Love

The Look of Love PDF Author: Paul Willetts
Publisher: Profile Books
ISBN: 1847659942
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 588

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Book Description
For almost forty years, Paul Raymond was one Britain's most scandalous celebrities. Best known as the owner of the world famous Raymond Revuebar, he was a successful theatre impresario, property magnate and porn baron. With his pencil moustache, gold jewellery and taste for showgirls, Raymond was both the brash personification of nouveau riche vulgarity and exemplar of the entrepreneurial spirit that enabled a poor boy from Liverpool to become Britain's richest man. 'Like 24 Hour Party People, we want to capture the life of an extraordinary man living in extraordinary times' Steve Coogan

North Soho 999

North Soho 999 PDF Author: Paul Willetts
Publisher: Dewi Lewis Publishing
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 280

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Book Description
A surprisingly topical non-fiction account of the murder that came to symbolise the crimewave threatening to overwhelm post-war London. It is the untold story of a Soho robbery and shooting carried out by a 17 year old and his two young accomplices. Much of the worldwide press reaction at the time focussed on the breakdown of law and order, rising youth crime, the spread of illegal firearms and the deterrent value of capital punishment - concerns that are frequently echoed today.

King Con

King Con PDF Author: Paul Willetts
Publisher: Crown
ISBN: 0451495837
Category : True Crime
Languages : en
Pages : 382

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Book Description
The spellbinding tale of hustler Edgar Laplante—the king of Jazz Age con artists—who becomes the victim of his own dangerous game. Edgar Laplante was a smalltime grifter, an erstwhile vaudeville performer, and an unabashed charmer. But after years of playing thankless gigs and traveling with medicine shows, he decided to undertake the most demanding and bravura performance of his life. In the fall of 1917, Laplante reinvented himself as Chief White Elk: war hero, sports star, civil rights campaigner, Cherokee nation leader—and total fraud. Under the pretenses of raising money for struggling Native American reservations, Laplante dressed in buckskins and a feathered headdress and traveled throughout the American West, narrowly escaping exposure and arrest each time he left town. When the heat became too much, he embarked upon a lucrative continent-hopping tour that attracted even more enormous crowds, his cons growing in proportion to the adulation of his audience. As he moved through Europe, he spied his biggest mark on the Riviera: a prodigiously rich Hungarian countess, who was instantly smitten with the con man. The countess bankrolled a lavish trip through Italy that made Laplante a darling of the Mussolini regime and a worldwide celebrity, soaring to unimaginable heights on the wings of his lies. But then, at the pinnacle of his improbable success, Laplante’s overreaching threatened to destroy him… In King Con, Paul Willetts brings this previously untold story to life in all its surprising absurdity, showing us how our tremendous capacity for belief and our longstanding obsession with celebrity can make fools of us all—and proving that sometimes truth is stranger than fiction.

Rendezvous at the Russian Tea Rooms

Rendezvous at the Russian Tea Rooms PDF Author: Paul Willetts
Publisher: Hachette UK
ISBN: 147211986X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 673

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Book Description
Rendezvous at the Russian Tea Rooms provides the first comprehensive account of what was once hailed by a leading American newspaper as the greatest spy story of World War II. This dramatic yet little-known saga, replete with telephone taps, kidnappings, and police surveillance, centres on the furtive escapades of Tyler Kent, a handsome, womanising 28-year-old Ivy League graduate, who doubles as a US Embassy code clerk and Soviet agent. Against the backdrop of London high society during the so-called Phoney War, Kent's life intersects with the lives of the book's two other memorably flamboyant protagonists. One of those is Maxwell Knight, an urbane, endearingly eccentric MI5 spyhunter. The other is Anna Wolkoff, a White Russian fashion designer and Nazi spy whose outfits are worn by the Duchess of Windsor and whose parents are friends of the British royal family. Wolkoff belongs to a fascist secret society called the Right Club, which aims to overthrow the British government. Her romantic entanglement with Tyler Kent gives her access to a secret correspondence between President Roosevelt and Winston Churchill, a correspondence that has the potential to transform the outcome of the war.

A-Z of Soho and Fitzrovia

A-Z of Soho and Fitzrovia PDF Author: Johnny Homer
Publisher: Amberley Publishing Limited
ISBN: 144569476X
Category : Photography
Languages : en
Pages : 193

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Book Description
A fascinating tour through Soho and Fitzrovia, neighbouring London districts, highlighting the heritage, people and places from across the centuries.