Michael Peppiatt

This book is difficult to classify and difficult to put down. The author is by turns self-promoting and vulnerable, leading a picaresque life in a city he loves and knows intimately. He is disarmingly frank about his love life - or lives, some simultaneous – and touchingly well-informed about the streets, cafes and people of Paris. But the core of the book is a deep understanding of contemporary artists, most noticeably Francis Bacon, whose friendship he earned when very young, and retained until the artist's death. One amusing aspect of the story he tells is that he worries for most of the book about whether he is a writer, and shows by the end that he definitely is.… (meer)