That sort of interaction is annoying online but (not to speak for Roem) I think getting it in person can be a trigger for an author to get back in gear, because it really brings home how invested an audience is in a work. It's easy to slip into impostor syndrome and think nobody cares.
Depends what you mean by 'anyone'; you can probably find at least one person in Britain who thinks Harold Wilson was a holographic projection of a Martian made of marshmallows who was grown by Lord Lucan in a vat in Atlantis. To answer more seriously, the Wilson-as-spy theory is certainly far from mainstream anymore (not that it ever was), but you can probably still find some number of older people who still genuinely think it, just not many.
Yes, this. There's plenty of older people who think he was a wrong'un and 'shifty' and, particularly in the context of his defence cuts, will unironically say they aren't sure where his loyalties were. But full-blown 'he's in the pay of Moscow' stuff was present at the time of his being PM - while still fringe - but has died away since then, in large part (I assume) because stuff like Spycatcher exposed the degree of investigation that took place, and turned up nothing, and since then we've had a lot more 30 year rule declassification and something would've slipped out by now.
Oh don't be ridiculous everyone knows that was Callaghan!
That doesn't make sense, Prague was almost stereotypically good at running agents, they wouldn't pick someone as 'obvious' as Corbyn. Obviously Corbyn would be a CIA plant if anything by that logic.
