‘I’m a hypocrite and a total fraud’ – the confessions of a French Surrealist poet
My writing is mere bricolage … whatever I do, I only half do’, wails Michel Leiris in the final volume of his self-lacerating autobiography
When the going was good
Though she photographed many society figures of the 1930s, Ker-Seymer lacked ambition and remains largely unknown – as she herself seems to have wanted
His own best creation
Once a beacon at events with his sunglasses and white ponytail, the designer who revived many failing fashion houses has left nothing of himself behind
More Russian escapism
Vladimir Sorokin, old enough to have been banned in the Soviet Union, flourished in the post-Gorbachev spring, and he fled…
Linguistic games
David Shields is an American author who has decided to collate many of the questions he’s been asked in interviews…
The gay carousel
John Giorno, who died last year, was a natural acolyte: he needed a superior being to set him in motion.…
The music deafens
People often say that the battle for male gay rights has been won, at least in the West, and that…
The great taboo-breaker
In 1983 I was sent to New York to interview Johnny Rotten and I took the opportunity to call on…
Searching for Coco on the Côte d’Azur
Anne de Courcy, an escapee from tabloid journalism, has become a polished historian of British high society in the 20th…
France gets a taste for Bacon
The case of Michael Peppiatt is a curious one. He first met Francis Bacon when he was an undergraduate at…
It is not the masterpieces that were lost, but the collectors, Natalya Semenova rights a wrong
It is not as surprising at it sounds that two of the greatest collectors of modern art should have been…
The sight of blue hydrangeas brings out the worst in Henri Cole
This new book, from the NYRB’s publishing arm, is in a non-fiction genre I love: short entries dedicated to an…
Are European cities really so much better than our own?
Early on in his introduction of nearly 60 pages, Owen Hatherley writes: ‘I find the Britain promised by Brexiters quite…
Beyond Timbuktu
Every so often a monster comes along. Here’s one — but a monster of fact not fiction, over 700 pages…
Gay tittle-tattle
The Comintern was the name given to the international communist network in the Soviet era, advancing the cause wherever it…
The Mann who knew everyone
Thomas Mann, despite strong homosexual emotions, had six children. The two eldest, Erika and Klaus, born in 1905 and 1906…
Hermitage director Mikhail Piotrovsky knows all the secrets of his museum, and he’s keeping them
The front cover of this book describes the Hermitage as ‘the Greatest Museum in the World’. That sobriquet must go…
Rio’s rococo genius
The surname is pronounced ‘M’shahdo j’Asseece’. There are also two Christian names — Joaquim Maria — which are usually dispensed…
Toujours la politesse
Robert Cumming’s opening sentence is: ‘Kenneth Clark and Bernard Berenson first met in the summer of 1925.’ One is then…
What’s to become of Pedro Friedeberg’s letters?
Duncan Fallowell on the elusive Mexican artist and man-of-letters who has been his friend and faithful correspondent over many years — though they have never met
Going to pot
Since drugs became popular, there have been countless books on what to do with them. The most interesting are those…
From pillar to crag
At the opposite end of the Continent to ourselves, Sicily has always been an attraction for the English who, from…
Guns and neuroses
William S. Burroughs lived his life in the grand transgressive tradition of Lord Byron and Oscar Wilde and, like all…
Not just a pretty dress
Every fashion era has its monster and in ours it’s Karl Lagerfeld, a man who has so emptied himself on…
