In 1949, art collector Douglas Cooper - a man as rotund as his pictures were cubist - picked up 25-year-old John Richardson at a party. And a turbulent 12-year relationship began.
By all accounts, it was less of a grand love affair than a pragmatic decision made by both parties. Richardson got his entree into a world in which Picasso would drop in for tea on the way to his mistresses, while Cooper got his dark, good-looking boyfriend who at first knew and cared little about art, although much later - long after the relationship had reached its bitter and fiery end - was to become a leading art critic and professor of art history at Oxford.
This book is ostensibly, as its subtitle suggests, about Cooper, Picasso and their various adventures in the South of France, where Cooper bought a derelict chateau, Castille, in which to show off his collection and live his own rather careful version of a bohemian life.
But it is also about the frequent demands, the occasional delights, and ultimately the destructive desperation of being a protege, a lover of a famous man, and a shadow which is not expected to develop a light of its own.
Richardson describes a bitchy world in which egos were nurtured, shot down, and then nurtured again.
A world in which nobody, including the author, comes out looking terribly honourable.
Picasso was a bundle of ego and sexual needs, grimly superstitious, obsessed with death, getting cruel pleasure from humiliating his former and present mistresses. He also had an uncanny way of fixing his eye on people, draining them of their energy.
