I love this biography. I reread it almost every second year. I even ordered the auction book from his estate upon his death and then went on to read biographies of everyone else in his life mentioned in this book like Cecil Beaton and Siegfried Sassoon. A unique individual. I wish they could make a movie of his life. On my tenth reading I am still enamored of this extraordinary life...he touched so many people and had so much talent that never truly arrived as expected. He produced so much that was never published and which was lost over time or was auctioned off piecemeal on his death and his prodigious output was never collected in one place. ( )

"Stephen Tennant was just a flamboyant gay who didn't really do anything," says one of the many supporting players in Mr Hoare's exhaustive doorstopper of a biography. True, this is the life of a man who essentially is best known for being a striking-looking girlish boy at London parties in the 1920s (as one of the Bright Young Things), then spending the rest of his life loafing about in his mansion. He was born into wealth and could do whatever he liked. There was no need to prove himself, no ambition, no drive. He did manage to have some modest success as a painter, but never really advanced past the status of cult figure, at best.

But Mr Hoare saw a life that needed to be properly chronicled and celebrated, and his enthusiasm rubs off on the reader. There's just something about Stephen. The ultimate lonely gay aristocrat, so free yet so trapped. This book redeems him, in a way, proving that just being a beautiful boy turned reclusive eccentric is an achievement of sorts.



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