¶Scarce in jacket. Wyndham Lewis, 1882-1957, achieved acclaim for his talents as a novelist, visual artist, and self-styled 'Enemy'. A dazzling work of selective autobiography, encompassing his early career as an author, artist, and soldier; Lewis is clear about his intentions from the first paragraph, in which he declares 'a good biography is a kind of novel'. Part literary autobiography, part war memoir, fragmented and devastating as a shell-burst, the book tears through the early twentieth century, spitting out portraits and character sketches of Auden, Augustus John, Rebecca West, and many more. If one is ever to come close to understanding the complex and impossible Lewis, this is the only place to start. His grief at the deaths of Gaudier Brzeska and T.E. Hume is raw and moving (his subsequent terror of another war informing many of the political views which led Auden to describe him as 'that lonely old volcano of the Right'), his account of a row with T.E. Lawrence is hilarious and shows Lewis in typically irascible form, while his account of flatulence in the trenches is surprisingly prim from this 'Buffalo in Wolf's clothing'.