Clancy Sigal

Clancy Sigal lives in Los Angeles. His last novel to appear in the UK was Zone of the Interior.

Letter

In Stock

5 March 2015

Kitty Burns Florey compares the ‘sensible and elegant italic script’ taught in UK schools to the ‘ridiculous’ Palmer Method taught then as now in US schools (Letters, 9 April). Florey misses the character-building dimension of Palmer. I had four years of Palmer Method handwriting and failed every time, so I had to take it over again and again. When I graduated the vice principal called me into...
From The Blog

Stuart Hall

14 February 2014

Stuart Hall and I used to argue about jazz. He was a Miles Davis fan, and I was into the Modern Jazz Quartet. The third member of our late 1950s Universities and Left Review troika, Raphael Samuel, was more or less tone deaf except for folk. In the New Left’s early days Stuart and Raphael made a fabulous team: Stuart unfailingly courteous, cool, unflappable and – quite rare this on the left – with a terrific sense of humour.

Letter

Zionism came later

11 April 2013

I was an American soldier in Occupied Germany after the Second World War. We GIs lived in a former SS barracks in Frankfurt am Main. We were comfortable and happy, free to loot the fine wine cellar the Nazi elite had stored in the basement. Our ‘shit work’ – cleaning toilets, sewing uniforms – was done mainly by Polish, Russian or Balkan Jews, some of them Displaced Persons from the murder...
Letter

High Stakes in Highgate

29 January 2009

Paul Myerscough writes of the other players in a poker game he’d just been busted out of: ‘They’d forgotten me already’ (LRB, 29 January). He might not be altogether correct. I’m a reformed player. In the 1960s and 1970s we had a rolling high-stakes game in London, mainly Fleet Street guys (no women, heaven forfend) and such types. At one particular game in Highgate I lost a pot-full of money...
Letter

Gt a lfe

4 December 2008

Leah Price’s piece on the origins of Pitman shorthand made me feel as if I might not be the last person standing who knows how to ‘do’ Pitman (LRB, 4 December 2008). I was taught it at an essentially all-girls high school in Chicago, where I’d been sent as a punishment for juvenile vandalism. As a would-be court reporter and cub journalist, my stenographic world was divided between upright...

Pieces about Clancy Sigal in the LRB

Squealing to Survive: Clancy was here

John Lahr, 19 July 2018

‘I love​ the con, crises are my fuel. It’s the best high … and anaesthetic,’ Clancy Sigal wrote in Black Sunset, a memoir of his Hollywood hustle as an agent in...

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