Well, I never knew that's why they were called ampersands, but I did put them in all the letters in TMOL, for just that period flavour, along with superscripts and all sorts - I'm a typesetter's nightmare.

We weren't allowed biros at my school in the latish 1970s. Actually, I think my daughter still isn't! I decided fairly recently to set the 'modern' bit of my new novel back to 1995, and it's interesting to work out what's different.

Emma

I'm wondering what the assembled sages make of Philip Roth's appropriation of the persona of Charles Lindbergh as a fascistic US president in The Plot Against America. Does it qualify as a historical novel, or is it more sci-fi? I'm guessing Mr Roth has a pretty hot lawyer...
Tony

For years I've been planning to write the story of my husband's family in the USA which is a wonderful mixture of Last of the Mohicans and Gone With the Wind, centred on his great, great grandmother, Nancy Jackson. I talked to an editor at Berkeley/Jove about it and was appalled when she said I would need to put in lots of sex. How can you write sex scenes about your father-in-law's great grandmother? I have her rocking chair in my living room and would confidently expect to be haunted if I attempted it. Moreover my husband said, rather dauntingly, that he would prefer the history of his family to be treated as literature, not romance.

That was the end of that project.

Hilary

I'm guessing Mr Roth has a pretty hot lawyer...

No need for lawyers if Lindbergh's dead, though.

But yes, family members. I put my own great-great-great grandfather into TMOL, but not in a way that would make him haunt me, I hope.

Emma

Has anyone successfully sued a writer for besmirching the name of a dead family member?

No, because

<Added>

oops. You can't libel the dead, so no, you can't be sued for libelling them.

Emma

This discussion made me think of an interesting article I read a few weeks ago about James Joyce's grandson (possibly great grandson). It's slightly off the topic of this thread but apparently he is preventing Joyce's work from being even read aloud claiming that it is infringing copywrite. He has also suppressed several letters and other documents from entering the public domain. This seems like a man who is very keen on "protecting" the work and privacy of his ancestor. I'd love to know how he reacted to films such as Nora or any other fictional work about Joyce's life. Would be outraged by them? does he have a right to be given that a lot of Joyce's work was at least semi-autobiographical?

http://news.scotsman.com/international.cfm?id=182392004

He has a track record for this sort of nonsense, and if we were in the Lounge I'd say what I think of him, but we're not

He has copyright in the words, and he may have legal ownership of the physical letters and so on, but he has no control over what people say of Joyce, since Joyce is dead. Morally, as opposed to legally, I think there's case for saying that you shouldn't say/write untrue and offensive things about a dead person if it will upset living friends and relations, but I don't think it should be a sueable (I'm sure there's a proper word for that) offence.

Emma

For an amazng example of how to use real people in fiction read American Tabloid and the Cold Three Thousand by James Ellroy. the first take sin the kennedy assassination and uses real figures such as the kennedys, J Edgar Hoover, Howard Hughes in a fantastic way.