Book Launch | Serious Pleasures: The Life of Stephen Tennant

Alongside the publication, we will also be screening a rare archive film, and a small display of ephemera and art by Stephen Tennant.
Stephen Tennant was barely a being of his time. A fixture of high society during the 1920s, he was once driven around London in wearing a striped football jersey, a pair of earrings, and gold dust in his hair. He was a performative, transformative figure – an alien icon, like Dorian Gray, Ziggy Stardust, or a Warholian superstar.
Republished for the first time since it became an international bestseller in 1990, Serious Pleasures goes in search of this enigmatic aesthete. Muse to Cecil Beaton, lover of Siegfried Sassoon, confidante of E. M. Forster, Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West, Tennant would became a kind of queer oracle, reclining in his manor in deepest Wiltshire with parrots and lizards for company, receiving visitors such as Truman Capote, Greta Garbo, David Hockney and Derek Jarman.
Did they find an indulgent, wilful figure, stranded in time? Or an heroic artist, living without regard for societal norms? In Serious Pleasures recreates, with astonishment and affection, this outrageous life lived as a work of art.
Philip Hoare is the author of ten books, including Leviathan, or the Whale, winner of the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction, and William Blake and the Sea Monsters of Love (2025). He lives on the south coast of England and swims every day in the sea.

Image: Stephen Tennant as Prince Charming, 1927. Photo: Cecil Beaton