Serious Pleasures

PREORDER — Expected release: 02 March 2027. This book is not yet available. Dispatch is subject to supplier availability and publication-date changes.

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

Stephen Tennant was barely a being of his time. A fixture of London's high society during the 1920s, he was once driven around town wearing a striped football jersey, a pair of earrings, silver glitter in his hair and Vaseline on his eyelids. He was a transformative, performative, gender-challenging figure - a decadent and alien icon of his age, like Dorian Gray, David Bowie or a Warholian superstar.Republished for the first time since it became an international bestseller in 1990, Serious Pleasures goes in search of this charismatic, enigmatic aesthete. Patron of Cecil Beaton, lover of Siegfried Sassoon, confidante of E. M. Forster and T.E. Lawrence, Vita Sackville-West and Willa Cather, Tennant would later become a kind of oracle of a faded glittering era, lying like Sleeping Beauty in his overgrown Arts and Crafts manor in deepest Wiltshire, where he would receive visitors such as Truman Capote, Christopher Isherwood, V.S. Naipaul, Greta Garbo, David Hockney and Derek Jarman. All the while he was creating lusty, deeply queer images of matelots and coquettes from an imaginary Marseilles for his never-ending, never-to-be-completed illustrated novel.Was Tennant an obscure, selfish figure, stranded in time? Or an extravagant, heroic pioneer without regard for societal norms? Philip Hoare recreates, with astonishment and affection, the extraordinary trajectory of an outrageous life lived as a work of art.

About the author

Philip Hoare is the author of six works of non-fiction: Serious Pleasures: The Life of Stephen Tennant (1990) and Noel Coward: A Biography (1995), Wilde’s Last Stand: Decadence, Conspiracy, and the First World War (1997), Spike Island: The Memory of a Military Hospital (2000), and England’s Lost Eden: Adventures in a Victorian Utopia (2005). Leviathan or, The Whale (2008), won the 2009 BBC Samuel Johnson Prize for non-fiction. Most recently, The Sea Inside (2013) was published to great critical acclaim.

An experienced broadcaster, Hoare wrote and presented the BBC Arena film The Hunt for Moby-Dick, and directed three films for BBC’s Whale Night. He is Visiting Fellow at Southampton University, and Leverhulme Artist-in-residence at The Marine Institute, Plymouth University, which awarded him an honourary doctorate in 2011.