Ruby Hamilton

David Lynch’s​ films seemed to come out of nowhere. That’s what he said, anyway. Ideas were ‘little gifts … They just come into your head and it’s like Christmas morning.’ One moment he would be thinking about Bobby Vinton’s 1963 cover of ‘Blue Velvet’; the next thing he knew, a severed ear was lying in a field. ‘That’s why I...

She first saw him​ walking ‘rather contemptuously’ across the Pont Marie. Frock coat, tall hat, ‘gone-bad, luminous look’. Risen from the pages of Enid Starkie’s Life, here was her hero of heroes, Charles Baudelaire, and he was staring right at her: ‘He wanted to impress himself on me – young clay takes the print better. And the message was totally...

If Celia Dale​ is a nasty writer, then her nastiness, like Roald Dahl’s, is partly cosmetic: no boil goes unenlarged, no paunch unemphasised. Her novels (thirteen in total, often described as works of domestic crime fiction or ‘suburban horror’) display a fondness for all creatures sallow and bowlegged: a menagerie of bedraggled birds, wet fish and disgusting old walruses....