Via The Browser, an excellent obituary for JG Ballard, from 2009, by Martin Amis:
In 1964 his wife Mary died suddenly, on a family holiday, so Ballard raised their three children himself. To begin with he could only manage to do this by drinking a scotch every hour, starting at nine in the morning. It took him quite a while to push this back to six o'clock in the evening. I asked him was that difficult, and he said: "Difficult? It was like the Battle of Stalingrad."
