[quote author=Colston36 link=topic=257778.msg2636665#msg2636665 date=15657732
My dream is to live in a brothel; like Toulouse-Lautrec but taller and with less talent.
F**king brilliant! 
What is interesting is that someone else did. In "Both the Ladies and the Gentlemen". William Donaldson recounts his experience of living with a whore or two. A splendid man. As one reader commented: One of the all time great comic novels in the English language. Don't bother with Wodehouse, Tom Sharpe or the others just read this and all his others. Not only funny but also wise, intelligent and bittersweet.
His biographical survey of roguish Britons through the ages, Brewer's Rogues, Villains and Eccentrics (2002), has been described as "a breathtaking triumph of misdirected scholarship". I gave it to my son in New York, who I am pleased to say takes after me, but must try harder.
He also wrote the Henry Root Letters, a wonderful piss take of the great and good (the twats who run Britain).
He backed the show that made Dudley Moore, Peter Cook, Alan Bennett and Jonathan Miller famous
Read this bio and realise what a GREAT man he was:
Donaldson married Sonia Avory in 1957 and she bore him his only child, Charlie. However, he left her for Jacki Ellis, then the wife of Jeffrey Bernard, but in due course she left him. A sequence of affairs followed, including liaisons with Sarah Miles and Carly Simon.
He left Miles for Simon, whom he described as "the answer to any sane man's prayers; funny, quick, erotic, extravagantly talented", but this did not prevent him from jilting her while they were engaged and returning to Miles. In 1968, Donaldson married Claire Gordon. The couple epitomised 1960s Swinging London.
He later remembered that "sex, whether in company or not, has been the only department in life in which I have demanded from anyone taking part the very highest standards of seriousness."
What a fucking hero. I am lucky to have outlived him- we were born in the same year.