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A love letter to Paris and a memoir of a life spent at its bohemian heart, rich with adventures, misadventures and the beauty of one of the most enduringly romantic cities in the world

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A love letter to Paris and a memoir of a life spent at its bohemian heart, rich with adventures, misadventures and the beauty of one of the most enduringly romantic cities in the world

The Existential Englishman is both a memoir and an intimate portrait of Paris - a city that can enchant, exhilarate and exasperate in equal measure. As Peppiatt remarks: ´You reflect and become the city just as the city reflects and becomes you´. This, then, is one man´s not uncritical love letter to Paris.
Intensely personal, candid and entertaining, The Existential Englishman chronicles Peppiatt´s relationship with Paris in a series of vignettes structured around the half-dozen addresses he called home as a plucky young art critic. Having survived the tumultuous riots of 1968, Peppiatt traces his precarious progress from junior editor to magazine publisher, describing memorable encounters with a host of figures at the heart of Parisian artistic life - from Sartre, Beckett and Cartier-Bresson to Serge Gainsbourg and Catherine Deneuve. Peppiatt also takes us into the secret places that fascinate him most in this ancient capital, where memories are etched into every magnificent palace and humble cobblestone.
On the historic streets of Paris, where all life is on show and every human drama played out, Michael Peppiatt is the wittiest and wickedest of observers, capturing the essence of the city and its glittering cultural achievements.

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One of the best art books I have read, by turns atmospheric and waspishly gossipy but also profound and poignant Praise for Francis Bacon in Your Blood, Michael Prodger, The Times

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Peppiatt, Michael
Michael Peppiatt graduated from Cambridge, where he edited Cambridge Opinion and wrote exhibition reviews for the Observer. In an international career spent between London, Paris and New York, Peppiatt has written regularly for Le Monde, the New York Times, the Financial Times, Art News and Art International magazine, which he re-launched as its new publisher and editor from Paris in 1985. He is the author of over twenty books including the definitive Bacon biography, Francis Bacon: Anatomy of an Enigma (revised edition 2008). In 2005 he was awarded a PhD by the University of Cambridge for his work in the field of twentieth-century art. Peppiatt has also curated numerous exhibitions worldwide, and he is currently at work on a major retrospective contrasting the achievements of the two modern artists he most admires: Alberto Giacometti and Francis Bacon.

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