4. Almost certainly fictitious.
5. The damage to the brick wall can still be seen in the front court of Magdalene College, Cambridge. Professor Boyd declined to press charges.
6. Letter to The Times, 26th January 1997.
7. The Guy Burgess Club was set up in Cambridge by Grainger and his friend Andrew Latham-Turner. It continues to this day, its initiation rituals clouded in secrecy. There is no way of proving that our current Prime Minister, Chancellor of the Exchequer, Foreign Secretary, Chief of Staff of the Armed Forces, Archbishop of Canterbury, Head of MI5, Chairman of the CBI and the Board of Governors of the BBC are former members.
8. Grainger never denied that publicity from his million pound advance helped generate sales.
9. Timberlake Hunter, writing in the books section of the Independent on Sunday. Grainger responded furiously to the allegations of plagiarism and Hunter retracted them shortly before entering a Trappist monastery.
10. Grainger’s cousin resigned as chairman of the panel of judges.
11. Cassandra Jones was Grainger’s fifth literary agent in as many years. She committed suicide in the summer of 2006.
12. Sir Peter could not keep quiet, declaring to the Telegraph, “I don’t know who got the little bastard but I can’t believe I had anything to do with it.”
13. Grainger’s investment in various private armies is well documented in Andrew Latham-Turner’s Soldiers of Fortune, Flamand Press, New York, 2019.
14. Grainger’s pamphlet, Why War is Necessary: a Commonsense View (The Heritage Foundation, Washington D.C.) was reprinted nine times between 2003 and 2007.
15. Regularly for the National Review and the Spectator.
16. For instance: “I never claimed to be a neo-conservative. I knew they were wrong from the outset and made great efforts to set them right. But what can you do with a bunch of former Trotskyites except nod and smile and try to contain them?” (Prospect, January 2009)
17. Badiou has since renewed her allegations that she was the ghostwriter of Grainger’s “comeback” trilogy.
18. The elephant’s head was stuffed in Nairobi and shipped back to Nether Compton. See The Last Great Game Hunter, Nicholas Gaston, Plum Tree, London, 2029.
19. It is certainly true that a large donation was made at this time to the orphanage in Phnom Penh.
20. His daughter has never spoken publicly on the subject.
21. The most detailed work is by the Romanian journalist Nikolai Comanescu, who spent seven years on Grainger’s trail and interviewed many of his lovers, colleagues and victims across three continents. See The Human Whirlwind: Virgil Grainger by those who knew him, translated by Nina Hawkes, Oxford, 2027.
22. Grainger admitted, in a late interview with the author, that he had written speeches for his “friends” at Exxon Mobil and Halliburton.
23. Letter to the author from Grainger’s oncologist, Dr Janus Gray.
24. Grainger’s conversion surprised friends and family alike. Father Dmitri was later convicted of war crimes committed during the Bosnian conflict.
25. Controversy still abounds regarding his final resting place. Nikki, his seventh wife, insists that the ashes were scattered at the roots of a date palm in the centre of his island in Dubai, but the Grainger family claims that he was buried under a walnut tree at Nether Compton. In the words of his biographer, Nathan Wilson-Grainger: “He may have been a bastard but he was their bastard. The family wanted him where they could keep an eye on him…”
Copyright
© Gregory Norminton 2013
First published in April 2013 by
Vagabond Voices Publishing Ltd.,
Glasgow,
Scotland
E-book edition published in April 2013
ISBN 978-1-908251-16-9
The author’s right to be identified as author of this book under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 has been asserted.
Cover design by Mark Mechan
The publisher acknowledges subsidy towards this publication from Creative Scotland
For further information on Vagabond Voices, see the website, www.vagabondvoices.co.uk
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