The Tangier Diaries
Format:Paperback
Publisher:Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
Published:10th Jun '21
Should be back in stock very soon
John Hopkins brings back to life all the decadence and flamboyance of Tangier in the 1960s and 1970s.
Tangier in the 1960s and ’70s was a fabled place. This edge city, the 'Interzone', became muse and escapist's dream for artists, writers, millionaires and socialites, who wrote, painted, partied and experienced life with an intensity and freedom that they never could back home.
Into this louche and cosmopolitan world came John Hopkins, a young writer who became a part of the bohemian Tangier crowd with its core of Beats that included William Burroughs, Paul and Jane Bowles and Brion Gysin, as well as Tennessee Williams, Jean Genet, Yves Saint Laurent, Barbara Hutton and Malcolm Forbes. Those intoxicating decades – Tangier's 'Golden Years' – are long gone. Grand old houses that once sparkled with life are shuttered and dark and most of the eccentrics who once lived and loved in the city have died.
But here, in the pages of John Hopkins' cult classic, all the decadence and flamboyance of those days is brought to life once more.
An incomparable diarist. * Elle *
[Hopkins] draws the reader into the daily life of what he describes as the “Saigon of the Sahara”, with tales of his encounters with the likes of William Burroughs, Malcolm Forbes, Wilfred Thesiger, Timothy Leary and Rudolf Nureyev [...] a chronicle of an era that has disappeared forever. * Independent on Sunday *
All lovers of The Sheltering Sky will be grateful for this intimate record of Paul Bowles’s methods and opinions. -- Michael Arditti * Daily Mail *
The Sixties are vividly described and we are plunged into the exotic world centred on writers Paul and Jane Bowles. A hit. -- Judy Cooke * Mail on Sunday *
A grand read. -- Ephraim Hardcastle * Daily Mail *
Morocco (especially Tangiers) was one of the places to be in the early ’60s. [...] Now it seems almost mythic, a great, outlandish American Bloomsbury. Hopkins delivers all the expected goodies and more: the requisite desert meditations, the kif-censed evenings in the kasbah, the celebrity sightings [...] a graceful, laconic stylist. * Kirkus Reviews *
His diaries are crammed full of fine writing, warmly drawn recollections, and source material which will be used by historians so long as people want to read about the powerful confluence of cultures in collision which was Beat Tangier. -- Joe Ambrose * Outside Left *
His beautiful diary is full of wonderful pen portraits of the many and various characters on display, vivid little street scenes and evocations of landscape [...] and personal stories. -- Jon May * The Generalist *
ISBN: 9780755645565
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: 214g
240 pages