His exuberant new novel culminates with a slaughter in a used-car lot on a Florida beach, to where he has led his main cast: two high-school boys in love with a class companion, a loony Cuban who has nightmares of fighting in Angola, a fat, pizza-guzzling Puerto Rican cop and his novice assistant, the policeman's huge transvestite son and his male lover.
Arthur later joined the Military Order of the Loyal Legion of the United States (MOLLUS) as a Third Class Companion, the honorary membership category for militia officers and civilians who made significant contributions to the war effort.
Though the $450 annual fee isn't cheap, it comes with benefits like SkyClub access and a free domestic first-class companion ticket.
Those elements of the revived series that seemed most fresh in 2005 – a working-class companion with a well- developed family background, a council-estate setting, the sense that the Doctor's personality contained a thick streak of darkness – are all to be found in Sylvester McCoy's last season of Doctor Who.
In her moulting fur and gym shoes, Frances de la Tour's splendid Dorothy – peeress, ex-model and long-time recluse – is as grand and down-at-heel as Stacpole, the decaying country house in South Yorkshire where she lives in dust-sheeted, Arctic conditions with her lower-class companion Iris (a marvellously moth-eaten and slyly subversive Linda Bassett).
The fee buys perks such as a five-year renewable visa with 90-day stays, free first- or business-class companion tickets, and the right to purchase permanent residence in the kingdom.
Benefits include 24-hour concierge service, complimentary business-class companion air tickets on certain international flights, upgrades from economy to business class for international air travel, discounted prices in Sotheby's catalogs and free admission to top museums.
In 20 years the working-class dinner guests may be working for their middle-class companions: not because they are any less talented, but because – simply put – the odds are stacked against working-class children, and in favour of their middle-class counterparts.
As repellent as Douglas's behavior appears in the light of contemporary morality, for his social peers in Bloomsbury, a gentleman's right to do as he pleased carried more weight than any presumption of legal protection for Douglas's young, working-class companions.
Orthia contends that whilst working-class companions had featured previously in the show "none were unskilled workers nor chronically under- or unemployed like Rose, Jackie and Donna".
An announcement published in the London Gazette read: "The Queen has directed that the appointment of Vicky, Mrs Pryce, to be a Member of the Civil Division of the Third Class, or Companion, of the Most Honourable Order of the Bath, dated June 13 2009, shall be cancelled and annulled and that her name shall be erased from the Register of the said Order".
