Josep Pla was my first Spanish teacher. If I drop the odd anachronism into the conversation, don’t blame me, blame the great Catalan writer, journalist, bon vivant and, it has been said, forerunner of magic realism. It all started after spending Semana Santa climbing the dirt track to Sant Pere de Rodes with my wife […]
Tag Archives: Dali
CASA ANITA IN CADAQUES
Casa Anita in 1984 was still a well-kept secret, The Ritz for those with a bohemian spirit and a taste for fresh fish that has leapt straight out of the sea and landed on the grill. Named after the effervescent owner, Anita was a beautiful woman with dark lustrous eyes, hair black as coal and […]
What is Spanish Fly?
They say in Amsterdam you can buy anything – even girls appear semi-clad in shop windows. Smoking cannabis is decriminalised and I was once offered Spanish Fly in a bar in De Wallen by a man wearing an eye patch. ‘It will make your dreams come true,’ he said and winked. Gabriel García Márquez may have […]
Death and the Maiden
In the story Death and the Maiden, a pretty young woman – innocent, probably a virgin – is seduced by Death, in the shape of a monstrous old man – sometimes with horns, sometimes just a skeleton. The two images capture the yin and yang of all things, all opposites. But, like yin and yang, each […]
That Sense of Having Arrived
It was a feeling hard to put into words, that sense of having arrived, perhaps. It was like opening a locked box and letting all the dead air out. Or going to bed in one place and waking in another. It was the summer of 1990. Sam Roxburgh and his wife Rosaleen were having one […]
Prince Charles and the Lost Copyright
Has Prince Charles read Sex, Surrealism, Dali and Me? Seeing how he was for a brief time the copyright owner, I rather like to think that he has and thoroughly enjoyed it. I wrote ‘Sex, Surrealism, Dali and Me’ long before I became cynical and had the rare pleasure of reading the translated version in Spanish […]
Brigitte Bardot and the Painting that Never Was
There must be a good reason why neither Salvador Dalí nor Picasso painted Brigitte Bardot. They both had the chance. They both liked beautiful young women – albeit for different reasons: Dalí because he was a slave to beauty, Picasso because he liked sex with young women. Yet, neither put graphite to paper, oil on […]
The Bourgeoisie Stole Dali’s Toilet Seat
Salvador Dalí was a work of art, his own masterpiece. ‘I work seventeen hours a day,’ he cried. ‘The measure of my genius is the size of the hole I perforate in abstract matter.’ He didn’t believe in inspiration. ‘It is the obsession of repetition the Gods take note of.’ Routine was the watchword and he […]