Everything about Picasso, except his physical stature, was on an enormous scale. His appetitel for sex and money, eating and drinking, friends and quarrels, comedy and tragedy, are legendary.

No artist of the first rank has been so aw-inspiringly productive. No artist of any rank has made so much money. A few artists have rivalled his life-span of ninety years, but none has attracted so insatiable a public interest.

Patrick O’Brian, author of the famous Aubrey-Maturin novels, was a near neighbour of Picasso’s in the south of France for many years and knew him well. His much admired biography gives full weight to the distinctly Mediterranean origins of Picasso’s character and art. The man that emerges from teh pages of this scholarly and passionate biography is one of many contradictions: hard and tender, mean and generous, affectionate and cold, private despite his relish of fame.

A man who, despite the professed communism of his later years, in O’Brian’s view, retained to the end of his life a residual Catholic mentality.