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Dog Days in Soho
Gollancz 2000, Phoenix pbk 2001

Intro

This is, for want of a better word, a biography. My friend’s stepfather, Josh, came to Hampshire to paint the outside of our cottage. In the evenings he told me about Soho in the 1950s, his memories of Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon - and, later, the poet and critic William Empson - and how this period of his life had killed something in him. Josh had the temperament of an artist but not the accomplishments; people who should have known better used him and threw him away. This is what I deduced from what he said. Then, a week after finishing the paint-job (brilliant white) he dropped dead and this book started. The narrrator is me but he is also a character in Josh’s story. This conflation was unplanned but then I realised that it was good. The book is a partly fictionalised and periodically surreal account of true events, ending with Josh and I finding refuge in the background of a Francis Bacon painting.
Dog Days in Soho  
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