Rogue Male

One of the strangest news stories to catch my eye this week concerns the Queen obsessive who constructed a hide on an island in St James's Park so as to constantly have Buckingham Palace in his sights; his desiccated bones have only just been discovered. Coincidentally I have been reading some old obituaries of John Symonds, one of the literary executors of Aleister Crowley. In 1966 he wrote the novel 'With a View of the Palace' 'about a man obsessed with the Royal Family who spies on King George V from the lavatory of his flat overlooking Buckingham Palace.'