Previous “Author” pages

Visitors might find this sub-section the easiest to ignore on the entire site, but I thought it might be useful, if only to avoid interrogation on the telephone, to assemble in the one spot any information that editors and producers might want to employ when they are engaged in the task — increasingly less common, I’m glad to say — of summing me up. As a start, there is a link to a brief biography. Later on I hope to add the beginnings of a photo-caption autobiography, and also a bibliography as complete as it can be made, although that last job will be trickier than it might seem. Just how I ended up no longer owning even a single copy of some of my books is a subject for psychoanalysis. Profile writers who sincerely want to establish a link between me and Charles Rennie Mackintosh are at liberty to use the photograph accompanying this paragraph.

Otherwise it might be better to use the one at the top of the Brief Biography page, which is also the photograph used in the logo of the website. My apologies in advance for the results: if I had planned on a career of having my picture taken, I would have been much more careful to correct my physical appearance as it deteriorated, or, indeed, during its formative stages. Journalists and picture editors saddled with the task of evoking my erstwhile television career should feel free to steal from the Digi-Cream foray into the subject. It’s what the cheeky blighters deserve, although they are not always wholly inaccurate. A warning, however: studio stills are almost always somebody’s copyright.

Like most writers who work hard at putting sentences together in proper paragraphs, I hate seeing bits and pieces being torn loose, and I especially loathe the term “one-liner”, a form which I have never knowingly practised. But when Wikiquote took it upon themselves to compile a list of my supposed pearls, I felt bound to acknowledge the judgment with which they did it. Apart from a few misprints, which luckily are obvious, their list is a good job, and I include it here, under the title of “Quotations”, as part of my Life Story. Journalists unlucky enough to draw the assignment of writing about me are bound to find that page anyway, so they might as well find it here, on the premises.