He is very bad. SPLAT. From the naff photograph SNAP of him in his silly dated clothes to his inability PAFF to write anything without sounding like a fifteen year old WOW on acid I hated every inch of this. TOSS.

The early short novel written in Russian in Paris which was the first glimmering of Lolita. Even in translation (by his son) he is unable to write badly. Here the predator is discovered by his would-be child mistress masturbating and races out to commit suicide. The eventual novel is far more daring.

This is a painful book. Painful because we know how it is going to end. Mortality isn’t going to have a happy third act. Painful because it is painful to read of the pain that accompanies the end. Particularly with the Big C, and the patience with which people put up with bombarding radiation into their bodies. And most painful because we can have no more Hitchens. Even the sad eyes and lugubrious expression of the balding victim on the cover is painful. And yet he doesn’t let us down. He looks unrelentingly at his own condition and tells us what it is like, and what it looks like and what it feels like. Some things are just too painful.

Very disappointing. Badly written. It began to read like the outline of a book. I abandoned ship.

A New York intrigue, not quite intriguing enough. Nothing wrong, just not particularly engaging. A NY socialite and her constant amour but never married friend who gives her a ring which she first loses, then recovers and then finds it stolen by a nanny.

A clever and very quick read about a Cambridge blonde literally seduced into the secret world of MI5, and her amours which lead to her involving herself with a writer whom she is to arrange to sponsor secretly, and his revenge once that secret is leaked by an envious co-worker. Finely done yarn with a very smart ending one doesn’t see coming.

Paperman, a Jew from Broadway (so described) arrives on an idyllic Caribbean island with the intention of buying a run-down resort. It’s the fifties. He meets a married femme fatale, learns to dance to the steel band and is accompanied by a frightful huge man called Atlas.

My first ever James Bond. A weird tale this one, written in the first person by a young Canadian girl, who is in a cabin motel in the woods, and almost half the book is taken up with her young life story from girlhood in Quebec to London and the two men what done her wrong, one an English twit, and one a German co-worker. What’s odd is that the story doesn’t kick in till he has gone into all this, and then two thugs turn up and she is in peril and then, almost as if by magic, James Bond turns up. What are the odds. But Fleming handles the subsequent battle well. I guess that’s his appeal.

A compilation of short autobiographical pieces

I took this as a travel book to London, and of course got interrupted and side tracked and jet lagged and random. I was enjoying it and will pick it up later.