You can tell a lot about a man from the company he keeps, but also, added Hilaire Belloc, from the library he keeps. Naturally enough, I’m casting an eye around mine to see what kind of a man I might be. Principally a self-important one, if I consider these shelves a library at all, and, secondly, a distressingly illiterate one, as the shelves groan not with the virtuous and the edifying but, unfailingly, with unimaginative rubbish.
This included eating and having somewhere to live, relying instead on the comfort of friends and strangers. “Another roof, another proof,” was his mantra. Picasso’s creative brilliance, on the other hand, was based on the skilful cross-fertilization of ideas and aesthetics. For his Les Demoiselles D’Avignon, a touchstone of 20th-century modern art, he borrowed from Cézanne, El Greco, and masterful African artefacts, transmuting them into something undeniably new.