News about Dirk Bogarde

During the nation's deadliest attack in September 1944, Sergeant Frank Ashleigh, a 19-year-old glider pilot, was killed. Sergeant Ashleigh, after dropping off a jeep and two trailers in the area of Renkum, next to Arnhem, decided to go on a reconnaissance trip to keep in touch with the Germans. However, the tiny group of four glider pilots encountered enemy soldiers everywhere they went on the road to Oosterbeek. They hid in the belfry and took turns to fire at the enemy with a rifle from its window and plunged into a Roman Catholic church. On the 75th anniversary of Market Garden in 2019, he spent time with King Charles III in a replica glider plane (top right).

RICHARD KAY: It was electrifying as an entrance. He strode on to the screen, wearing a sleek top hat and stockings in the style of Marlene Dietrich's The Blue Angel, radiating an ethereal and dangerous beauty. Helmut Berger's personal life might have matched the sordid debauchery he brought so vividly to The Damned, the controversial 1969 film in which a German arms manufacturing family's story and their links to the Nazi rise was coincidental. Berger, the heir whose emotional tumultuous journey, comes to an end with his mother's sex and her lover's forced suicide, played by Dirk Bogarde. One critic expressed his displeasure with the catalogue of murder, incest, rape, tranvestism, and child molestation as if he's spent the afternoon in the reptile house at [London] Zoo." Miss Dietrich, however, was thrilled, complimenting Berger, who spent weeks perfecting his impression of her, and sent him a picture of herself inscribed: 'Who's prettier? Marlene is a sweetheart.'

Nonetheless, in the years since Hollywood discovered the Riviera, David Niven, Dirk Bogarde, and Gregory Peck purchased villas; Hitchcock filmed To Catch A Thief on location with Grace Kelly and Cary Grant; Brigitte Bardot became a international celebrity; the Cannes Festival became a 'large block of reinforced concrete; in general, the site, which once saw so many lush woodlands, became a huge block of reinforced concrete;

The book contains the tragic tales of Bolton Wanderers defender Harry Goslin (middle) who died in Italy after delivering his Ghurkas to war in Burma, Fulham's Joseph Stephenson (right) who was shot in the chest while charging a machine gun post in France and Southhampton FC player Sid Gueran (bottom left) who was shot in the mouth during the failure Operation Market Garden in the Netherlands.

LORD ASHCROFT: They live in the shadows, both men and women of the British Army's most obscure division, the Intelligence Corps. They have been delivering extraordinary feats all around the world for more than a decade, but they still don't get enough credit for their service because of their clandestine nature of their occupations. It recruits - and values - mavericks, which is why Paddy Leigh Fermor was a natural recruit to its ranks. He was regarded by a teacher at his academy as a "risky mixture of intelligence and irresponsibility." He was not surprised that he was kicked out of office. Nonetheless a youth, he took off walking around Europe, from the Channel to Constantinople (or Constantinople, as he preferred to say it), carrying a rucksack carrying a few spare clothes and a collection of Horace's Odes. He was on the road for the next six years, sleeping in farmyards, inns, monasteries, and grand houses, mixing with vagabonds, gypsies, and aristocrats.