Serious Pleasures

A new reissue of Philip Hoare's singular biography of Stephen Tennant. 'Witty and amazing ... both scholarly and hilarious at the same time' John Waters, New York Times Philip Hoare's fascinating profile of Britain's most legendary and flamboyant aristocratic aesthete. With unparalleled insight into Tennant's bizarre and outrageously eccentric life, Hoare presents a superb biography that reflects an age of intellect, indolence, narcissism and pure style.

Philip Hoare is the author of ten works of non-fiction. His Leviathan won the Baillie Gifford Prize, and the New York Times praised his last book, Albert & the Whale, as the result of 'the forceful weather system that is Hoare's imagination'. Writing in the Observer, Laura Cumming called his writing 'the animating magic that brings people of the past directly into our present and unleashes spectacular visions along the way'. He lives in Southampton, on the south coast of England, and swims every day in the sea.