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Robbins, Christopher

Christopher Robbins was a British writer and journalist. He wrote the 1978 bestseller Air America about the secret airline run by the CIA for covert operations during the Vietnam War, which was made into a film in 1990.

The numbers in square brackets refer to the issue of the quarterly in which the article appears.
The unbracketed numbers refer to the starting page of the article.
For entries in multiple issues of the quarterly, the occurrences are separated by semi-colons.

articles by, [19] 32; [21] 7; [22] 81; [25] 42; [30] 30; [36] 46; The Empress of Ireland, [66] 13

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20240503140054 Celtic Charm and Champagne, The Empress of Ireland, Newsletter

Celtic Charm and Champagne | Empress of Ireland

‘The Empress of Ireland is not enjoyable because it does something cliched like “capturing a lost world”; it entertains wildly because the author, purely by chance, encountered a truly original character that even the finest novelist could not have invented.’ – Gustav Temple, The Chap The subtitle to this delicious book is ‘A Chronicle of an Unusual Friendship’, and it would indeed be difficult to imagine two more unlikely companions than its author and his subject, the 80-year-old gay Irish film-maker Brian Desmond Hurst.
20240502160028 Christopher Robbins, The Empress of Ireland, Slightly Foxed Edition No. 51

The Empress of Ireland | Part III: London

Christopher Robbins

I arrived at Kinnerton Street one morning to find an extremely tall man standing on his own in the front room warming himself in front of the fire. He did not introduce himself but launched into an incomprehensible monologue. ‘I had dinner with her again last night. At the Ritz. We had the most delicious lamb cutlets. Served pink. She loves them pink like that. And a bottle of Léoville-Poyferre 1961 – do you approve? A whole bottle – not a half.’
20220110102651 Brian Desmond Hurst | Christopher Robbins, The Empress of Ireland, Slightly Foxed Editions No. 51

The Empress of Ireland | Noël Coward visited Tangier

Christopher Robbins

My routine was to stay in the house and write most days, and then go out with Brian for dinner, either to a restaurant or the home of one of his friends. La Belle Hélène was the bar and res­taurant we most frequented, owned by a strangely glamorous, middle-aged French lesbian with a face of elephant hide. She was said to have bought the establishment with money earned during a long circus career as a motorcyclist on the flaming wall of death. We ate elaborately at La Belle Hélène and drank copi­ously, and Brian indulged us extravagantly at lunch and dinner.
20211004154223 SFE 55: Richard Cobb, Still Life & SFE 51: Christopher Robbins, The Empress of Ireland - Recommended by John Banville, Literary Review September 2021

‘Two rich recent discoveries – both published by Slightly Foxed Editions’

John Banville, Literary Review

The Empress of Ireland is the novelist and screenwriter Christopher Robbins’s account of his friendship with the most successful forgotten Irish film director of all time, Brian Desmond Hurst . . . The book, simply, is a masterpiece, and its neglect is as inexplicable as that of its subject. Still Life by Richard Cobb, first published in 1983, is a memoir of a Tunbridge Wells childhood. Cobb, historian and Francophile, seems to have had a photographic memory, and his memoir is both an uncannily vivid resurrection of past times . . .
20200601145309 Christopher Robbins, The Empress of Ireland

‘What larks!’

Antony Wood on Christopher Robbins, The Empress of Ireland

Essentially it is the story of the friendship between Christopher Robbins, a struggling young freelance journalist, and Brian Desmond Hurst, an ageing Irish film director who had already outlived his talents and gloriously continued to do so up to his death in 1986. For a delicious period of pure fantasy in the mid-1970s the two lived the life of Reilly together. When he first met Hurst the young Robbins was in his late twenties and vainly trying to claw his way out of perpetual debt. The agent of his introduction was an enigmatic American hipster masquerading as a German count whom he’d run into in Spain, and whose expertise was ‘putting people together’.
20100301115848 Christopher Robbins, Edith Sitwell - Slightly Foxed Issue 25

A Splendid Attitude to Death

Christopher Robbins on Edith Sitwell, English Eccentrics

‘Eccentricity’, wrote Edith Sitwell, ‘exists particularly in the English, and partly, I think, because of that peculiar and satisfactory knowledge of infallibility that is the hallmark and birthright of the British nation.’ Ah, those were the days. And just in case this unfashionable declaration of tribal perfection fails to establish Dame Edith’s unabashed élitism, she adds: ‘Eccentricity is not, as dull people would have us believe, a form of madness. It is often a kind of innocent pride, and the man of genius and the aristocrat are frequently regarded as eccentrics because genius and aristocrat are entirely unafraid of and uninfluenced by the opinions and vagaries of the crowd.’
20110601144824

Mountain, Sea and Storm

Christopher Robbins on Antoine de St-Exupéry, Wind, Sand and Stars

The most unorthodox branch of the American Legion, the United States’s organization of war veterans, is ‘China Post One, Shanghai – Soldiers of Fortune in Exile’. Founded in 1919, it originally met in the American Club in Shanghai until war and revolution chased it out. Today it is the only American Legion post in exile and nominally headquartered in a Communist country. The membership roster, made up of adventurers, mercenaries, CIA-paramilitary types, spooks, old China hands, and a curious mélange of pilots, includes legendary figures from the Far East.
20090601110654 Christopher Robbins, Finnegans Wake - Slightly Foxed Issue 22

Sound Nonsense

Christopher Robbins on James Joyce, Finnegans Wake

The words rolled out, natural and clear, and I listened with new ears and understanding. Enlightenment had finally come. Passages spoken aloud in an Irish accent, by someone who loved the prose enough to commit long passages to memory, released the book’s power. Its beauty had been unlocked not by a literary intellectual, but by a half-tight man in a cheap suit standing at the bar of a Dublin pub. Finnegans Wake was revealed as a work of sound rather than sense, a form of high falutin, Gaelic, literary rap. Ireland talking in her sleep. It was as if Brian had taken me by the elbow, and guided me into this particular tavern to receive a final, Celtic benediction.
20090301125155 Daniel Macklin - Christopher Robbins, George Orwell - Slightly Foxed Issue 21

All Washed Up

Christopher Robbins on George Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London

Many years ago, when I was in my early twenties, I lived in Copenhagen where I was registered with the Foreign Ministry as correspondent for The Times. But I made my living washing dishes. The paper paid by the line and used so little of my copy that I was forced to find illegal work as a scullion in one of the city’s less elegant restaurants. And it was during this time, morbidly attracted by the title, that I found a copy of Down and Out in Paris and London.

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