'A compelling, absorbing account of a most vivid period in our cultural history, both high-minded and full of high gossip ... a rare treat' Melvyn Bragg
The first volume of David Plante's extraordinary diaries of a life lived among the artistic elite, both a deeply personal memoir and a hugely significant document of cultural history
Nikos and I live together as lovers, as everyone knows, and we seem to be accepted because it's known that we are lovers. In fact, we are, according to the law, criminals in our making love with each other, but it is as if the laws don't apply. It is as if all the conventions of sex and clothes and art and music and drink and drugs don't apply here in London...
Strangers to this new city, from previous lives in New York and Athens, David Plante and Nikos Stangos are embarking on a new life together, a partnership which will endure for forty years. London, at a moment of 'absolute respect for differences', offers a freedom in love unattainable in their previous homes.
From the King's Road to Bloomsbury, worlds within worlds emerge: friendships with Stephen and Natasha Spender, Francis Bacon, Sonia Orwell, W. H. Auden, Christopher Isherwood, Steven Runciman, David Hockney and R. B. Kitaj; meetings with E. M. Forster and Duncan Grant. Connections appear to criss-cross, invisibly, though the air of London, interconnecting everyone.
David Plante has kept a diary of his life among the artistic elite for over half a century. Spanning his first fifteen years in London, from the mid-sixties to the early eighties, this first volume of memoirs draws on diary entries, notes, sketches and drawings to reveal a beautiful, intimate portrait of a relationship and a luminous evocation of a world of writers, poets, artists and thinkers.
As readers of the notorious Difficult Women (1983) will know, candour is also the hallmark of what Plante writes about others, and those drawn to this book for its high-calibre gossip will not be disappointed . Absorbing, illuminating and hugely entertaining diaries. They stand as a vivid memorial to an entire era from which, as the necrology in a postscript all too vividly shows, most of the leading players are now lost to us
