Philip French recalling a conversation

http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2012/may/06/goodbye-first-love-review

Alan Brien going live

Alan’s entry will go ‘live’ on Thurs 5 January. You should be able to access it by entering a public library membership number at http://www.oxforddnb.com/.

its your birthday approaching darling man. there wil be hand raised pork pies, bayaldi, caper berries

Ronnie Payne's anecdote

"I'm really pleased to be asked. I should have be in touch ages ago. What I intended to tell you was about Alan's kindness to me when I was in a state after my first wife Isabel had run off while I was being a Hemingway type foreign correspondent in Paris. Alan came with me to my deserted London flat. Highly emotional and slightly pissed I burst out - "I can't stand it, the whole place has become a tear trap."
Most friends would have made sympathetic noises. Alan said "That's a great title for your novel"
"Yep. All I need now is another hundred thousand words" I replied and we both went out and got cheerfully drunk.
love ronnie"

"His features resembled a fossilised wash rag."
- Alan Brien (about Steve McQueen).

Alan Brien
Well, I forget the rest by Quentin Crewe
Hutchinson, 278 pp, £17.99, September 1991, ISBN 0 09 174835 6
Many is the time I have hauled Quentin Crewe into a restaurant on my back, his wrists crossed under my chin, his voice chattering into one ear or another. As I did so, I often caught a surreal glimpse of myself as some kind of hunter of human game, bearing to the cannibal feast one more main course still alive and thrashing. ‘Q’, I am happy to say, is still alive and stirring things up – not least in this quirky and curious autobiography.

Oxford Dictionary of National Biography

Paul Vaughan will be writing an entry on Alan for the next publication of the DNB. If anybody has anything to add do please post it here.