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I first met William Burroughs in 1963 I was working for a now defunct literary magazine called Transatlantic Review and we were planning to publish a piece of his called ‘The Beginning is also the End’ I’d proposed doing a drawing of Burroughs for the cover and the editor of TR had agreed and so I went round to see him in a tiny hotel room in Princes Square, Bayswater, which I gathered Alex Trocchi had found for him Trocchi put his head round the corner at some stage to check that the room was okay I remember Trocchi saying that ‘you couldn’t go far wrong here, Bill, not on three pounds a week’ This was what the hotel cost, it being more like a run-down rooming house than a hotel   Bill had come to England from Tangier principally to take a heroin cure which he had set great store by The cure had been devised by a Dr John Yerbury Dent of the British Journal of Addiction and consisted of apomorphine which was apparently morphine boiled in hydrochloric acid ‘It works as a total body emetic,’ Bill explained, ‘if you even have even the remotest whiff of heroin your whole body throws up’   He insisted that Dr Dent’s formula was working although I couldn’t help noticing that he seemed keen on a cough mixture called Breathe-Eezee which contained morphine, and I’m not sure that he wasn’t also taking Collis Brown, a popular cure-all, which in those days used to have morphine in it as well   I did the drawing which was published along with Bill’s story and from then on saw quite a bit of him He invited me to see Fellini’s 8 ½ at what was then the International Cinema in Westbourne Grove He was silent for a good while afterwards and then halfway up Queensway turned and said drily with his expressionless Buster Keaton face, ‘Yep, those Italians really know what life is about’   He was interested in how you could make maps of the human personality and gave me a copy of something called The Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory, a