An accretion of accumulators

The word ‘camp’ is often used as shorthand for ‘homosexual’. Its wider cultural sense has been best defined by Susan Sontag: the sublime treated as ridiculous or the ridiculous treated as sublime. In Sontag’s first category might be Marcel Duchamp’s daubing a moustache on the Mona Lisa. And in the second? Well, suppose somebody wrote a huge, respectful, footnoted book on the St John’s Wood Clique — the group of Victorian artists which included W. F. Yeames, painter of ‘And When Did You Last See Your Father?’ (I wrote an article on them in Apollo magazine 40 years ago. That’s as far as it went, but my father commented, ‘It may be heretical, Bevis, but I believe in studying good artists.’)

I have reviewed two of Stephen Calloway’s books in this magazine, both on camp of one kind or the other: Baroque Baroque and Divinely Decadent — the titles alone are campissimi.