STEPHEN CALLOWAY

Now available for the first time in paperback, this extraordinary book examines the culture of excess in all its twentieth-century manifestations. Fashion, film, photography, design and decoration: all feature in Stephen Calloways consideration of the colourful, the opulent and the theatrical. The author examines early examples of Baroque excess by the Sitwells, Cecil Beaton, Angus McBean and others as well as the darker Baroque spirit of the wartime Neo-Romantics or film-makers such as Fellini and Jarman. Tracing the Baroque tendency into the 1990s, he shows how ideas have cross-fertilized, providing links between such unlikely bedfellows as Leon Bakst and Luis Buñuel, Coco Chanel and Nigel Coates, Liberace and Lacroix. Illustrated with a wealth of photographs, this book provides a celebration that is truly Baroque.