Craig Brown. Hello Goodbye Hello: A Circle of 101 Remarkable Meetings.

A book on encounters and conversations, that can be useful to inspire stories and plots. Craig Brown is a columnist for the British magazine Private Eye, with a well-researched collection of conversations between famous characters. Craig Brown gathered these sometime bizarre meetings, expected or unexpected, from different sources. This book even includes an incident of Adolf Hitler being hit by a US student testing his new car in Germany before World War II. There is also an account of a 2-hour visit that Rudyard Kipling made to Mark Twain when the former was still a young follower of the latter whereas years later Twain became an admirer of Kipling. The book is filled with gossips, funny stories and interesting conversations between iconic names including artists, composers, filmmakers and architects, etc. Craig Brown tells us that “Everything in this book is documented…Nothing is invented. When accounts of the same meeting differ, as they almost always do, I have sided with the most likely.

Craig Brown. Hello Goodbye Hello: A Circle of 101 Remarkable Meetings. Simon & Schuster. 2012

Also reviewed by Michiko Kakutani. New York Times, August 2012.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/06/books/hello-goodbye-hello-by-craig-brown.html?pagewanted=1&tntemail1=y&_r=1&emc=tntGreat