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“... information to light. Its blurb called it ‘the only serious biography of the man himself’. Now Donald Spoto, author of The Art of Alfred Hitchcock (1976), has undertaken to show The Dark Side of Genius, on the ground that (according to his blurb) ‘the intensely private, secretive Hitchcock eluded the serious biographer until now.’ This is unfair ...”

“... anxiously – and accurately – to his agent, on the opening of Small Craft Warnings in 1971. Donald Spoto believes the story he has pieced together reveals his subject ‘as a man more disturbing, more dramatic, richer and more wonderful than any character he ever created’. This orotund declaration is simply irrelevant, and it does less than ...”

“... US, Europe and South America with a medley of scenes from Shakespeare. ‘His voice was quiet,’ Donald Spoto writes in his new study of the Redgrave family, but still expressive, and his gait often unsteady, but audiences seemed to provide him with a shot of adrenalin, and spectators were invariably impressed by the presence of Sir Michael ...”

“... again, this is a subject Val Wilmer frequently touches, but never seems to grasp – and from Donald Spoto’s life of Lotte Lenya it seems that the music-theatre of Kurt Weill, for all the considerable prominence it gave to female performers, was run by the men too. The most surprising aspect of the biography is the discovery that Lenya, with her ...”

“... married to Monroe for three days). There is a new addition to this group, a hysterical book by Donald H. Wolfe which may just prove to be the conspiracy sub-genre’s reductio ad absurdum: Bobby Kennedy and Sam Giancana and Marilyn’s psychotherapist tripping over each other in an effort to commit the great pointless homicide.* Monroe Books by Big Writers ...”