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
David Plante is the author of the novels The Ghost of Henry James, The Family (nominated for the National Book Award), The Woods, The Country, The Foreigner, The Native, The Accident, Annunciation and The Age of Terror. He has published stories and profiles in the New Yorker, and features in the New York Times, Esquire and Vogue. He lives in London; Lucca, Italy; and Athens, Greece.
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 cast is impressive: there us Francis Bacon in the Colony Room,
W H Auden buying carpet slippers in the Strand, Philip Roth and
Claire Bloom ... A wholly new picture of the Spenders’ marriage
materialises ... The book also offers a window on to a changing
world ... The sense of an older, more formal and class-based world
giving way to a new order is movingly portrayed ... The book is
also powerful as a portrait of mutual love
*Lara Feigel, Guardian*
David Plante is the ideal diarist: he has a fascination with the
famous, a relish for anecdote and gossip, an ability to capture
people in a few words, and the essential self-awareness. His
elegiac and often very funny portrait of the years 1966–86 … The
treat of the year
*Peter Parker, Spectator Books of the Year*
This memoir casts intriguing new light and shadow on the poet
Stephen Spender ... The complexities of interconnected liberal
literary and artistic life in 1960s and 1970s London are exposed in
candid extracts from the extensive, sharply observant, drily witty
diary that Plante has kept since 1966
*Iain Finlayson, The Times Biography and Memoir Books of
the Year*
An experimental amuse-bouche of a book ... Fascinating ... In
Plante’s account, Francis Bacon comes alive
*Spectator*
It is Plante’s study of his private life with his lover Nikos in
their London home and their glittering cultural circle which makes
his diary an eye opening glimpse of a recent but very different
England
*Metro*
A diary of 1960s London packed with high-end literary and art world
gossip
*Town & Country*
David Plante’s Becoming a Londoner was a shameless wallow in lost
time for me, since, in reading about this world, I see that it is
one I too both did and did not inhabit: high-bohemian, mainly male,
homosexual London Seventies society. Plante, a French-Canadian,
sees it with an outsider’s acuity, hankering and disconnection,
already nostalgic for his own present. And there is a strong
account of one great, lifelong love
*Candia McWilliam, Scotsman Books of the Year*
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
*Times Literary Supplement*
Plante’s anecdotal, witty diaries, spanning two decades, recall
drinking sprees with Francis Bacon, partying with Rosamond Lehmann
and standing next to Rudolf Nureyev at the urinals of the Curzon
Street cinema
*Independent*
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