Everything about this book suggests it is much more the biography of a celebrity than an author. An international aristocracy of writers, artists, photographers and politicians flits through its pages; famous names – Andy Warhol, Robert Kennedy, W H Auden, Norman Mailer, Joseph Brodsky, Jasper Johns – pop up with dizzying regularity, providing vivid glimpses of a milieu you might expect to find in an upmarket version of Hello! magazine. A photospread of Susan Sontag inviting readers into her lovely penthouse flat in Chelsea, with views of the Hudson River, would hardly seem out of place.
