Gorbals voices, siren songs - Ralph Glasser

"Growing up in the Gorbals" described Ralph Glasser's poverty-stricken childhood in Glasgow as the son of impoverished Jewish immigrants, while "Gorbals Boy at Oxford" took him south to wartime Oxford and the army; and in this, the concluding volume, he ventures out into the wider world of London in the 20 years after the war.;Working for the Arts Council and, later, in public relations, he straddled the worlds of business and Bohemia; unhappily married to a gentile girl, he still sought - as he had at Oxford - to put behind him the voices and the influences of the past, of his Jewishness and his Gorbals childhood. A film festival in Biarritz provides bizarre, almost surrealistic encounters with Cocteau, King Farouk and a Duke of Windsor virtually incapacitated by drink; Fitzrovia is scoured in search of a missing Oxford friend; a new life opens up after the extended torments of divorce: and yet, through all the changes and the excitment of his new life, old ties and old allegiances still, unexpectedly, make their claims, and inescapable truths intrude.