A selection of art books

I cannot think of many less festive offerings than Richard Avedon Portraits (Abrams, £24.95), but it has to be admitted that his merciless exposure of such grotesques as a blood-and-guts-spattered rattlesnake-skinner and a Duncan Goodhew-lookalike beekeeper, whose naked body is swarming with the six-legged tools of his trade, makes one sit up and take note. One of the minor pleasures of this collection is that literary and artistic celebrities have the same unflinching treatment meted out to them as drifters, and unless one happens to recognise the likes of William Burroughs, it is hard to tell which is which.

After Avedon, the images in Richard Calvocoressi’s Lee Miller: Portraits from a Life (Thames & Hudson, £27.50), with the exception of the occasional dead Nazi, seem positively reassuring. Here too the mix consists of A-list cultural glitterati – from Picasso and T. S. Eliot downwards – and ordinary people, and again there is a lot of blurring of boundaries.