Terence’s stamp: The Art of Living, by Stephen Bayley, reviewed

Rumours reach me that the libel report for Stephen Bayley’s forthcoming biography of Terence Conran was longer than the book itself, so I’m hazarding a guess that Bayley has siphoned off contentious material into this purported fiction. For as he says here, kidding on the level, ‘all novels are memoirs, all memoirs are novels’, and as Conran was Bayley’s colleague at the Boilerhouse Project at the V&A, the boys indeed have ‘previous’.

If the hero of The Art of Living, the brilliantly drawn Sir Eustace Dunn, is indeed Sir Terence, he comes across as a sly old fox who ‘betrayed everyone he knew’ and ‘never said please or thank you’. Though he became ‘Britain’s best-known designer’, the complete catalogue of his works, we are told by the narrator Rollo Pinkie bitterly, ‘is a very thin volume’.

His genius, rather, is for appropriating other people’s ideas and schemes — most notably buying up skillets and whisks, garlic presses and asparagus kettles in France and selling them in his chain of British shops, Habitat in all but name.