an unsavoury trick

"Surely, now that he was dead, the newspaper's undisguised homophobia and hostility might be tempered, if not balanced, in some reflection of the understanding that I had attempted to reach in my book."

John Coldstream, author of a recent biography of the secretive Dirk Bogarde, writes a vehement criticism of the appalling if sadly predictable treatment he suffered at the hands of the Daily Mail, who recently 'serialised' his work over four salacious and misleading 'Dirk The Deceiver' features.

"On the Thursday at about midday my agent forwarded the text to me. I read five paragraphs with incredulity and mounting horror. This was no extract. It was a grotesque re-write. I skimmed the remainder, and realised that instead of a serialisation in the accepted sense I was confronted by a tawdry travesty from someone unknown to me who had trekked through my 600 pages with a salacity-detector, and strung together a "life story" based almost entirely on material from the book that showed Dirk in an unfavourable light."

There's a lesson there. Never underestimate the sheer nastiness of the Daily Mail.

Full story here...
Coldstream on the Mail's distortion of his biography of Bogarde