Alex Harvey

Death​ was Denis Johnson’s subject: the already dead, the dying but not yet dead and the rush of life in its last seconds. In Angels (1983), his first novel, Johnson describes his protagonist’s final moments. Bill Houston, a petty criminal and heavy drinker, is facing the death penalty after killing a security guard:

He felt he could hold his breath for ever – no problem....

Scott Fitzgerald​ spent his declining years in ‘a hideous town, pointed up by the insulting gardens of its rich, full of the human spirit at a new low of debasement’. Hollywood, he complained in 1940, was ‘a dump, in the human sense of the word. Everywhere there is … either corruption or indifference.’ He used to wear a dark topcoat and homburg; ‘his...

In her memoir​ Kiss Hollywood Goodbye Anita Loos recalls her friend Aldous Huxley’s ‘childish love for picnics’. One excursion he organised ‘might have taken place in Alice in Wonderland’. Huxley had gathered a choice selection of his Californian friends: Charlie Chaplin and his wife, Paulette Goddard, dressed ‘in a Mexican peasant outfit’;...

If homosexuals are what they are because of birth or through early environment, and are not in themselves deliberately vicious men, they should not be punished. To punish in such circumstances is to persecute, to persecute a minority, to persecute as others have persecuted Jews and Negroes.