Ian Hamilton

Diary: Sport Poetry

Ian Hamilton, 23 January 1986

Today, Live Soccer returns to ‘our screens’ after a six-month haggle between TV and the Football League. It’s Charlton versus West Ham in the Cup and we are being exhorted to look out for West Ham’s new ‘goal-machine’, the Scottish striker McAvennie: ‘Now you’ll be able to see him for yourself,’ the papers say – an oddish line for journalists to take, I would have thought, but there we are. What matters is that soccer Is Back, and that we can all happily plug in again on Saturdays: Frank Furillo might be cool in dead-ball situations but he’s no Glenn Hoddle, and we all know that at Hill Street no one ever heard of a slow-motion replay …’

The Waugh between the Diaries

Ian Hamilton, 5 December 1985

If I were a trendy left-wing homosexualist, or an old age pensioner, or a half-Jew, or a young novelist, or a Negro, or an Anglican archbishop, or Harold Evans, or even the editor of an Arts Council-backed literary magazine, I suppose I would find some sections of this often amusing book offensive. Actually, more than offensive. I think I would want to do something pretty unpleasant to A. Waugh.

Letter

Literary Magazines

7 November 1985

SIR: Memory’s a funny thing, and Clive James’s memories are usually funnier than most. When I heard he was writing a piece about The New Review Anthology, I rather hoped for some rollicking anecdotal stuff about his Days and Nights in Soho. After all, Clive was pretty close to the action in those days. Curious, then, and just a bit middle-aged and sad, to find one’s old drinking buddy coming...

Letter

Barb

19 September 1985

SIR: There is a misprint (or was it what I typed?) in the Diary I wrote for your last issue. The published text has me describing the young transient Clive James as ‘a bundle of bread, booze and borrowed blankets’. The ‘bread’ should be ‘beard’.

Diary: It's a size thing

Ian Hamilton, 19 September 1985

In the current issue of a magazine called The Face there is an article on Norman Mailer’s recent visit to this country. He was here, it seems, to promote Tough guys don’t dance, his latest novel: he did some ‘major’ TV interviews, a bit of radio, and – towards the end of his stint – he called a press conference in order to complain about the low quality of the reviews he had been getting. His tone was querulous. He felt that we (I myself was one of the ‘wimp’ critics he objected to) had been made nervous by his powerful masculinity and, to cover up our fear, we had tried to get macho with his book. Mailer was angry, says The Face, and he was spoiling for a fight.’

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