Once a fashionable monster

Maurice Yacowar, Emeritus Professor of English and Film Studies at the University of Calgary, begins his ‘portrait’ thus: ‘John Bratby was an overachiever who fell short of his potential.’ Rather like this book really. Instead of a balanced assessment of one of the most interesting postwar figures in the British art world, we are offered a lurid account of Bratby’s private life and loves in the sort of shameless exposé of which their hero would quite possibly have approved.