Clancy Sigal: The London Lover

by Sigal, Clancy

ISBN: 9781408885802

Published: 2018

If Fielding's Tom Jones were alive in post-war England he might have been Clancy Sigal, the author of this restlessly curious memoir. Honest and devious, faithful and lustful, a mass of plucky contradictions, Sigal arrived in London in 1957. He was broke, homeless, and according to his FBI file, a dangerous 'subversive'. Over the next three decades, Clancy was to wander the streets of London, devouring as much as life could offer him. From the birth of the CND and his affair with Doris Lessing, to therapy with R.D.Laing and wondering whether the entire world was on acid, Clancy details it all to illuminating effect. Underneath these encounters is the character of Clancy himself: funny, hapless, warm-hearted and a self-professed 'crazy American'. Call it luck, charm or sheer lack of good sense, he escaped with a cracking good story.