The title on Amazon is Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties but I like this version better — it feels very Sixties.

Emma Cline’s retelling of the story The Girls takes the same attitude - it was all about the rejection by Melcher.

Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixtiest History of the Sixties

The crime scene and forensic evidence were so messed up in the Fatal Vision case that anything is possible, but the bottom line is that MacDonald was in the house while his wife and children were attacked, and he survived.  The killers let him live.  I’ve sometimes wondered if he hid from the killers while his family…

Her hair was short. That seems to be the story. Short-haired women, amirite?

The uninspired architecture aside, the town looked like a decent place to live ... trees, parks, quiet streets. The kids looked well-cared-for.

We’re not expected to believe that Anita wants Puerto Rico to sink back in the ocean, any more than she really thinks everything is free in America. She and the other women are kidding around with the guys.

Critics, those bastards, how dare they criticize! And they’ll even say that someone’s movie or book or TV show is bad, how hurtful can you get?  

Well, since they’re not criticizing how women look, just their clothes, then what is your point?  They’re not “skirting around” anything if they’re not doing it.

“Marsai Martin, who came up with the movie’s premise “

Her take on this experience now is interestingly different from the way that Richard E. Grant described it at the time in his book “With Nails”. He talks about meeting up with her in LA while she was filming 3 Men and a Little Lady and how humiliating she found it to be playing this clownish character when she was a…

Are you using “nonplussed” in the sense of “not bothered”?  Because that’s the opposite of what it means.

There’s an awful story in David Pryce-Jones’ biography of Unity about Hitler giving her an apartment in Berlin that had been taken from a Jewish family. According to the story, Unity came to inspect the apartment while the Jewish owners were still there. She didn’t give a shit.

Nancy’s two most popular books -- Love in a Cold Climate and The Pursuit of Love - have been turned into TV series, and these were more or less auto-biographical.  The Radlett family in Nancy’s books is the Mitford family.  

The Guinnesses have always found excuses for their grandmother. “But Grandmamma was so chaaaaarrrmmmming!”.

Unity did die about 5 years after she shot herself, of meningitis caused by the bullet in her head which couldn’t be removed. The saddest part was that she seems to have become a Nazi in order to be closer to Diana and Sir Oswald Mosley on whom she had a crush. She wasn’t the sharpest knife in the drawer. But once she…

Love in a Cold Climate is an amazingly funny book. The Pursuit of Love is great too although it could be improved if Nancy had replaced the heroine Linda with Cedric and Lady Montdore from Love in a Cold Climate. I never got tired of Cedric and Lady Montdore but Linda got boring fast.

No-one would believe it?  There was a musical based on their lives a few years ago.  Apparently it was awful.  

Nancy was so mean to Pam. She based the character of the horsey English bore Norma Cozens in Love in a Cold Climate on Pam, speaking of betrayal.  There’s an underlying affection there, though.  At least Pam wasn’t a Nazi.

YES. “Betraying” her makes it sound like Nancy revealed a secret entrusted to her. Everyone knew Diana was a Nazi — she bragged about it to the end of her life. She used to swan around the pre-WW II Nazi rallies in Germany, in black leather, making the Nazi salute with her sister Unity who was, I’m sorry to say,…