Uploaded June 2018 | Updated September 2026, 3 weeks ago
The old adage that it takes an outsider looking in to see what an insider looking out does not, was never more true than with the mischievous Clancy Sigal, who fled to London in the fifties in the wake of McArthyism, having worked as a talent agent on the Sunset Strip and found himself blacklisted.
The checkered career of this colourful character - novelist, journalist, screenwriter and BBC correspondent - unfolds in short, staccato chapters, as varied and captivating as his adopted city, whose manifold temptations rise up to greet him. It's a long way from sleeping under Charing Cross Bridge to doing so in Doris Lessing's bed (who, when proposed, responded: "You really are Peter Pan. Otherwise you wouldn't be with me. You'd be with some BBC wallah up Primrose Hill and running about in an Austin-Healey"), but our hero marches onward and upward, bloody but unbowed.
Funny, engaging, and remarkably perceptive for an observant foreigner's eye, this is a period piece, indeed.
R.I.P.
More autobiographies at:
bookreviewsandvideos.com/category/belles-lettres
The old adage that it takes an outsider looking in to see what an insider looking out does not, was never more true than with the mischievous Clancy Sigal, who fled to London in the fifties in the wake of McArthyism, having worked as a talent agent on the Sunset Strip and found himself blacklisted.
The checkered career of this colourful character - novelist, journalist, screenwriter and BBC correspondent - unfolds in short, staccato chapters, as varied and captivating as his adopted city, whose manifold temptations rise up to greet him. It's a long way from sleeping under Charing Cross Bridge to doing so in Doris Lessing's bed (who, when proposed, responded: "You really are Peter Pan. Otherwise you wouldn't be with me. You'd be with some BBC wallah up Primrose Hill and running about in an Austin-Healey"), but our hero marches onward and upward, bloody but unbowed.
Funny, engaging, and remarkably perceptive for an observant foreigner's eye, this is a period piece, indeed.
R.I.P.
More autobiographies at:
bookreviewsandvideos.com/category/belles-lettres
