Search Results

“... in country towns and even suburbs. The subjects of Barrow’s ‘double portrait’, his friends Quentin Crisp and the surrealist poet Philip O’Connor, were both children of the Home Counties. Crisp, who began life as Denis Pratt, found his way to bohemia from the Pooterland of Egmont Road, Sutton. O’Connor spent ...”

“... time and trouble.’ Sycophancy, you might think, was also part of McBean’s stock in trade. Quentin Crisp said that ‘unlike most of the men who work with the rich and famous he was genuinely star-struck. I never heard him speak badly of anybody well known.’ But the ability to play the pond to Narcissus required more than passive ...”

“... would conventionally deny them that are the most revealing. This was the impulse that propelled Quentin Crisp, ‘blind with mascara and dumb with lipstick’, through the ‘dim streets of Pimlico’. ‘Sometimes I wore a fringe so deep that it completely obscured the way ahead,’ he recalls. ‘This hardly mattered. There were always others to look ...”

“... and efforts at transcultural chic. Their eclecticism is bewildering. Yet style, according to Quentin Crisp, depends on consistency. Mr Crisp is, of course, a dandy – once, and famously, a dandy without means. Faced with the task of self-creation, of self-validation, Mr ...”

“... and tackle, and frames this ‘surrealised’ arrangement with silk drapery. His 1941 study of Quentin Crisp is an astonishing instance of the retoucher’s art, the subject’s burnished flesh so perfect it is hardly there at all. Is it armour or invitation, this confected gleam that connects the queer and the modern? It’s everywhere in Cecil ...”

“... the girl. Then there’s a piece about the joy of not wearing underpants. The agony uncle makes Quentin Crisp look like Charles Bronson, or is it Charles Bronson like Quentin Crisp? ‘Quilt covers or eiderdowns?’ an anxious letter-writer asks. ‘Blinds or curtains? Carpet or wooden flooring? Wallpaper or ...”

“... harsher. We seem to deserve each other, or at least to deserve to be reminded of hard truths, and Quentin Crisp is on hand to provide the recipe, as we ‘drop in’ on each other. It is the closest that food can come to ashes:                  Tibetan Workhouse Soup I have never cooked seriously either for myself or for anyone ...”

“... Glenn Gould, the late Princess of Wales) down to minor bog-sprites such as Eartha Kitt, Cher or Quentin Crisp. (Such lists are infinitely expandable.) What links each of these disparate individuals is a singularity so tangible as to border on the uncanny. We register each as a unique assemblage of moral and psychic tics: and each, in turn, seems to ...”

“... at the age of 14. The continuing fight against men’s slovenry is amply covered in these pages. Quentin Crisp, who ruled, ‘After the first four years the dirt doesn’t get any worse’ (‘Dust into dust, and under dust, to lie’, as the Rubáiyát says), is leniently described here as ‘inimitable’. Horsfield, who has written for the ...”

“... is a man who’s seen it all. He’s seen Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean have a drunken row, Quentin Crisp mincing the streets, Dylan Thomas in an alcoholic stupor reciting poetry in a loud voice, and much else. Including, perhaps, Wittgenstein cruising for rough trade? Surely, one might think, that is what the passage quoted by Sykes is meant to ...”

“... through the 19th century (for instance, in the persons of Fanny and Stella in 1870 and Quentin Crisp in 1940), to the present day.’ Or again, ‘a same-sex coterie may well have flourished at the court of Queen Elizabeth, around the Earl of Southampton, and may have involved a same-sex identity recognisably continuous with that experienced ...”

“... 50:50 gamble between losing nothing and losing £400, people are more likely to chance their arm. Quentin Crisp once said that a pessimist is someone who won’t get out of the bath to answer the phone. There’s nothing irrational about having risk-averse preferences towards gaining more of a good, while being risk-friendly towards losses; such patterns ...”

“... an affair with the actor Francis Carpenter, described by Callow as ‘camp beyond the dreams of Quentin Crisp’. The homosexual directors of the Gate Theatre, Micheál MacLiammóir and Hilton Edwards, were clearly smitten, though as Callow fairly notes, ‘the sexual undercurrent’ in MacLiammóir’s account of Welles’s physical impact (‘small ...”

“... whose names began with every letter of the alphabet except Q, because the only possibility was Quentin Crisp and he couldn’t face it. There were other rare glimpses of his interior life in conversations with friends. He once said that he thought his life was a failure because he had never been in love and had hurt those who had loved him. An insight ...”

“... indeed its death had been pronounced repeatedly for at least twenty years by Soho habitués from Quentin Crisp to Jeffrey Bernard. At the root of the perhaps unlikely friendship between Waugh and Attallah was a commitment to keeping up the old ways. The offices were cramped and editorial work was done amid chain-smoking, bridge playing and heavy ...”