Professional persona non grata Toby Young tells Rebecca Fox why some members of the media will call off their vendettas long before his wife does, and reveals which of his writings should really have his enemies running scared:

mediabistro: You've worked within multiple industries: theater, journalism, books and filmmaking: What's the relative bridge-burning quotient in each? Which industry (or individuals within it) forgives quicker, which forgets, and which will never stop punishing you for prior offenses?

Toby Young The general rule is that success absolves you of any sin. In my first book, for instance, I was pretty heretical about Conde Nast, but I got away with it because the book did quite well. Once it got onto the New York Times bestseller list, Si Newhouse had to call off his assassins. If it had done badly, by contrast, I think I would have disappeared without a trace. (This may be a total fantasy on my part. It could be that Si is completely unaware of the book to this day.)

There is an exception to this rule: actors. Woe betide the writer who dares to criticize an actor—and the better known the writer, the more heinous the foul. For the past five years, I've been the drama critic of the Spectator (Britain's equivalent of the New Yorker) and I don't think a single actor I've given a bad notice to has forgiven me. They have the memory of elephants.

This reminds me of an anecdote related by the Oscar-winning screenwriter Frederic Raphael. It dates back to the 1970s when he was writing plays for British television: "An actor came up to me and asked whether I thought that the hydrogen bomb really represented a threat to the future of the human race. I answered with a lot of on the one hand, and then again on the other. I had given him, he said, a lot to think about. Another actor sidled up to me and said, "May I say something? When an actor asks whether you think that the human race is threatened by atomic weapons, the required answer is, 'I think you're giving an absolutely wonderful performance.'"

Read on here. Also, you can read an excerpt of Toby's book here.