Gray rocks in his chair, forward into the present moment, and then back to 1971. "I remember when Liz and I met," he says. "I was going through to Edinburgh on the train with a friend for a show at the Talbot Rice Gallery, and Liz was going to receive an award from Radio Scotland."
Read MoreI ring the bell. No-one answers. The leaflet in my hand tells me this grey, slate-covered building – a monastery since 1895 – is the Church of England’s “best-kept secret”. But I have come to Hampshire to unravel another secret: that of the cult of Jane Austen.
Read MoreSuicide was never far from Hunter S Thompson’s mind. It was the night before Christmas Eve, 1977. At his typewriter, in a room 28 floors above Fifth Avenue in New York, he imagined going out onto the terrace, leaping "200 yards out into the air”, and landing broken and bloodied in the Plaza Fountain below. “Nobody,” he wrote, “could follow that act.”
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