Last year I complained to Amazon that a book sold on its website had infringed my copyright. Amazon quickly adjudicated in my favour and de-listed the title. But their high-handed anonymity and avoidance of any dialogue that could not be reduced to ticking a box made the experience memorably unpleasant. They were like robots! Beyond their seriously impressive selling operation which has elevated getting stuff to being as easy as in the blink of an eye, they were an intimid

This week Brief Encounter celebrates its eightieth anniversary. A lot of the credit for its extraordinary longevity belongs to its producer Tony Havelock-Allan, although when I interviewed him back in 2000 my abiding memory was of a man who was far too modest to make any great claims for himself. Even when he did take credit for something, he managed to do so in a self-deprecating way. So the title, for example: We didn’t know what to call the film. Still Life  was obviously

I was pleased a few weeks ago to be able finally to reach a settlement with Titan Books over John Walsh’s The Third Man: The Official Story of the Film. Published in September last year, it used large amounts of material from my book In Search of the Third Man without crediting me or seeking my permission. Titan agreed to insert an errata slip into the first print run of the book to credit its use of my work, and to pay me a small fee. It also agreed that corrections would be