Sex, Surrealism, Dali and Me: A biography of Salvador Dali

The Virgin Mary was fourteen when Joseph the Carpenter was already forty. He was a Sugar Daddy.'

Dalí was wearing a dark blue velvet suit, a ruffled shirt, a medal on a ribbon and a colourful waistcoat decorated with a fine tracery of stains like coral reefs on the Caribbean Sea.

Velázquez wig

One day, in the summer of 1970, I was standing naked in the studio, the light behind me, the sun glinting on the waves in Port Lligat. Dalí was pleased with the study on the easel and exasperated with the roughs that littered the floor. He called Arturo. 'Get rid of this rubbish. Burn it,' he instructed and, as we left the room, the faithful servan

I grew up believing all relationships ended in failure. Had Dalí not said love is a tapestry the lovers carefully unpick?

I knew why the mayor wanted to keep you in Figueras. It was where you were born, after all, where you had died, where you went to school, where you terrified your little sister and worried the notary, your father, proud and bemused by the genius son he had named in memory of the brother you never knew, the Salvador who died in childhood and haunted

The last canvas I saw him working on in Port Lligat was a painting of a decaying donkey, a scene lifted from Un Chien Andalou, the surrealist film he had made with Luis Buñuel in 1929. Every obsession returned. 'I am the concentric eccentric,' he said and I thought of ripples growing smaller as they vanish to nothing. He was shrinking, shrivelling,

Cadaqués, our little pueblo by the sea.

we had long admired photographs of Nanita Kalaschnikoff among the world's most wicked and wonderful; we would read about her husband's origins in the Russian nobility, his connection with that awful gun so beloved by terrorists. She was a Princess, a Spanish beauty with an uncanny resemblance to the Bourban monarchs and, in the Court of Salvador Da