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News From Nowhere Radical & Community Bookshop

not-for-profit - a workers'co-op - committed to social justice | 96 Bold Street, Liverpool L1 4HY - 0151 708 7270

The Naked Civil Servant

by Quentin Crisp - £9.99  HarperCollins Publishers (2015)
paperback    ISBN 13: 9780006540441 | ISBN 10: 0006540449

Quentin Crisp was a true original. With his mauve hair and flamboyant sense of style, by the time of his death he was widely hailed as one of the great British eccentrics.
 
An openly gay man in a less tolerant era (he once declared himself the �Stately Homo of England�) he was born on Christmas Day 1908 to �middle-class, middle-brow� parents, and sent to boarding school in Derbyshire (�a cross between a monastery and a prison�).
 
He moved to London in the 1920s, earning money through stints nude modelling, prostitution and book designing.
 
After a radio appearance in 1968 he decided to write his autobiography. Initially it sold only 3,500 copies and the future looked bleak (�If at first you don't succeed,� Crisp once said, �failure may be your style�). But after it adaptation into a drama for the BBC in 1975, books began to fly off the shelves and Crisp became an overnight celebrity.
 
He died in November 1999, just one month before his 91st birthday.

(Price & availability last checked: August 2018)

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In categories: Poetry & Writing, Men & Masculinity,

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