I can understand companionship.

I can understand bought sex in the afternoon.

I cannot understand the love affair.

GORE VIDAL

In my fanciful projections I took red hair to be the mantle of goddesses and priestesses who craved no obedience, like Ayesha, but a siren enjoining flight up into the firmament of life itself. It was the copper-headed helmet of destiny of those who would hurl their challenge against the very centre of creation and, having struck, plummet and explode upon a disbelieving world. It was lifted by the winds from the north-east, breathing like warspite Hotspur. It was the shade of the imagination’s crimson twilight, punitive and cleansing, the colour of communing voluptuaries, of pre-Raphaelites, Renaissance princes, of Medicis and Titians, of Venice and Northumbria, of blood axe and vengeance, Percy and Borgia, of Beatrice – Dante’s and Shakespeare’s – of hot pretenders and virgin monarchs. A red-haired Doris Day was unthinkable.

JOHN OSBORNE