Sinister levity of an all-seeing spider

As an an outstanding English painter and a delectable personality, Edward Burra deserves this entertaining biography. It should be admitted, however, that because Burra was a letter writer of great verve and individuality, half Jane Stevenson’s battle is won: the quotations flare up from the page. Luckily, they do not destroy the surrounding narrative, for Stevenson too can be stylish and sharp. Anyone who knows the engrossing volume of Burra’s letters Well, Dearie!, edited by his lifelong friend William Chappell, will surely pounce on this new book to reacquaint themselves with those letters already published and laugh aloud at extracts that will be new to them. A Burra letter is a joy forever: droll, delicately malicious, irrepressibly camp, full of forensic observations. For the most part unpunctuated, their stream of consciousness transmutes from stage cockney to ‘refained’ Rye (where he lived all his life), threaded through with Burra’s sinister levity that only rarely turns savage (‘I’m taking up my pen for Sunday venom, dearie, it relieves me’).