TURKEY-COCKING. That’s was Antonia Byatt accused Martin Arms of when he dropped Pat Kavanagh as his agent and took up Andrew 'the Jackal' Wylie, the better to score a sweet £500,000 for The Information. Sorry Antonia, you got it wrong. Dumping one agent for another is called coldcocking. I know this because I have just read Joe Eszterhas's Hollywood Animal, and one of the chapters, in which Joe tells his agent Mike Ovitz that he's moving to pastures new, is entitled 'I Coldcock Ovitz'.

To be fair to Byatt, coldcocking doesn't quite mean dropping one agent and picking up another. A literal translation would be dropping one agent, having that agent tell you, 'You're not going anywhere. You're not leaving this agency . . . I'm going to tie you up with depositions and