Apparently Lord Bath is writing an online autobiography, ‘an oeuvre of some seven million words’. For those without a computer, a broadband connection or any better way of spending a few years, Nesta Wyn Ellis’s The Marquess of Bath: Lord of Love (Dynasty Press, £13.99) will make an adequate substitute. It is a repetitive and incoherent book, not obviously reliable – the author thinks that fellatio is performed on women and that Guy Burgess was heterosexual – or even strictly literate, but oddly appropriate to its subject.
Apparently Lord Bath is writing an online autobiography, ‘an oeuvre of some seven million words’. For those without a computer, a broadband connection or any better way of spending a few years, Nesta Wyn Ellis’s The Marquess of Bath: Lord of Love (Dynasty Press, £13.99) will make an adequate substitute. It is a repetitive and incoherent book, not obviously reliable – the author thinks that fellatio is performed on women and that Guy Burgess was heterosexual – or even strictly literate, but oddly appropriate to its subject.
The elder son of a keen Nazi, Bath was educated at Eton and Oxford, and in due course inherited Longleat, where he resides in ‘a magnificent series of beautifully designed, very modern conference rooms’. Bearded and pigtailed, clad in kaftan and fez, he subsists on tinned or frozen food, washed down with rosé costing ‘under £1.50 a litre’, and is ‘more famous for his sex life than for anything else’.
Over half a century he has bedded, and painted in erotic murals, more than 70 ‘wifelets’. Wyn Ellis reveals that many have been one-night stands, quite a few on the dole, and two ‘are thought to have been’ prostitutes. She also investigates the ‘problem of wifelet violence’, not only wifelet-on-wifelet, which is distressingly common, but also marquess-on-wifelet: ‘I have slapped certain wifelets,’ Bath confesses, ‘but it’s not a great pleasure in my life.’
The general effect, wearisome but not entirely unpleasing, is of Sylvie Krin without the irony.
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