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“... I am widely regarded, I know, as an evil, profligate dwarf.’ So declares Roman Polanski, moodily kicking his souvenirs about on the last page of this autobiography. Of all the films he never made, the most revealing might have been the project he cooked up years ago in Paris for a sexually-explicit Snow White, with a mongoloid news vendor from St Germain-des-Prés as Prince Charming, a homosexual yodelling choir as musical accompaniment and a troupe of midget wrestlers to play the Seven Dwarves ...”

“... it no more than mildly interesting in a world full of more interesting events when I read that Roman Polanski had been imprisoned in Switzerland prior to being extradited to the US on a 30-year-old charge of rape. But, increasingly, in the news, on Facebook, Twitter, the LRB blog and in conversation, I’ve been reading the argument between those who ...”

“... except one, stationary, driverless. In the next shot we see a body washed up on a beach. The film, Roman Polanski’s The Ghost Writer, looks gleaming and beautiful throughout – the cameraman is Pawel Edelman, who also shot Polanski’s The Pianist, as well as Taylor Hackford’s glossy biography of Ray Charles. This ...”

“... the street outside his house. His character is fictional, of course, but he does live next door to Roman Polanski and Sharon Tate. Let’s pick up the story a little earlier. DiCaprio plays Rick Dalton, the once-upon-a-time star of a television series called Bounty Law. He was the man who killed the bad guys and collected the money. Now he still makes a ...”

“... characters are stuck in. Webb locked himself in a closet after reading this book, screaming that Roman Polanski was coming to get him. As soon as I make it out of Tashkent and back to Paris, I intend to rip my shirt off, run into the street, and start spitting garlic at the first English couple I can find honeymooning in France. ‘June came to God in ...”

“... ugly feelings surges across the global clothesline at the mere mention of ‘Woody Allen’ or ‘Roman Polanski’ in the press; Burroughs, too, has an anti-claque of Torquemada wannabes, enraged over his accidental shooting of his wife in 1951. Social media can launch a witch hunt or pogrom just as readily as a ‘progressive’ uprising, and in either ...”

“... he knew that Terry and Candice Bergen had moved out of their house on Cielo Drive and that Roman Polanski and Sharon Tate had moved in, some believe that the murders he committed there were in part a warning to Doris Day’s son. Terry descended into what we might call a ‘dark place’. Shotgun by the door, pistol next to the bed, lots of ...”

“... Virginie Despentes gone soft? Perhaps a little. Her most recent journalistic interventions – on Roman Polanski and the sexism of the French film industry; on race and police violence – still seethe and are written with a rhetorical zip that has seen them usefully appropriated at protests. ‘On se lève et on se casse’ (‘we’re getting up and ...”

“... Melcher’s old residence on Cielo Drive: the one place Manson was sure famous people were living. Roman Polanski and Sharon Tate had just rented the house. Polanski was abroad. The pregnant Tate had appeared in Valley of the Dolls and Polanski’s The Fearless Vampire Killers but was ...”

“... including figures not strictly experimental or popular but both, like Fritz Lang, Stanley Kubrick, Roman Polanski and David Cronenberg. Also distinctive is his selection of novelists; his semi-paranoid view of our ‘techno-institutional worlds’ leads Crary to turn to Thomas Pynchon, Philip K. Dick and J.G. Ballard.In 1982, Crary published a brilliant ...”

“... from Saudi Arabia.’ A few stiff drinks in the Paris nightclub and he carried it off – until Roman Polanski walked in with his usual compliment of nymphets. ‘Roman, this is Andrew Lloyd Webber.’ Time to run. The first chapter of the book, the prison time, was worked through many drafts. It’s the ...”

“... And then Sean O’Casey who was poor and nearly blind. All of them baptised into the wholly un-Roman and highly Protestant church. And none of them believed a word of it except poor Lady Gregory, who hoped for heaven. It must be fun not believing in anything, and having your fellow countrymen wanting you to clear off to England because of the very religion ...”

“... capricious and mad and permanently horny, a wealthy pair of monsters, like two figures in an early Polanski film. Then in 2004 came Epifanía Uveda de Robledo, or Fanny, Borges’s maid. She had revenge on her mind, for the slights inflicted on her by Borges’s mother and the injuries, real or imaginary, inflicted by Maria Kodama, whom Borges married some ...”