September in Melbourne finds me melancholy. The sun is bright but the wind is cold; the blossom is out but the winter sads hold fast.
It is around this time that I return to my Lamberts – three quiet, perfect books by Gavin Lambert, the English film critic who decamped for Los Angeles in the 1950s and chronicled the beautiful and the tarnished with equal clear-eyed, curious affection. The books are: The Slide Area (1959), Inside Daisy Clover (1963) and The Goodby People (1971). Along with Running Time (1982) they make up Lambert’s “Hollywood Quartet”.
