James Cahill

For a time, Robert Colquhoun and Robert MacBryde were at the heart of the in-crowd. Stories of Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud and their wartime circle often make reference to the two young painters from Scotland. Feted in the 1940s for their modernist styles – Colquhoun typically portraying figures, MacBryde preferring still life scenes – they later lapsed into painful, drink-sodden obscurity. Damian Barr’s novel, The Two Roberts, is a tender and evocative act of resurrection. It portrays the men’s lives from the time of their first meeting as students at Glasgow School of Art to the moment in the mid-1950s when, penniless and out of fashion, they retreated to an ancient cottage in Suffolk.

The fantasy of telling disagreeable friends how awful they really are is a relatable one. But rarely does it find such extravagant, relentless expression as in Zoe Dubno’s debut novel Happiness and Love. The narrator is a nameless woman who finds herself among former friends in New York. While she never succumbs to an outburst, her interior monologue issues forth like a furious esprit d’escalier. The dramatic scenario – modelled on that of Thomas Bernhard’s 1984 novel Woodcutters – is a dinner party in the loft dwelling of an ‘art world’ couple with whom the narrator used to live, following the funeral of one of their cohort.

Edmund White grew up in a world where sex, and gay sex in particular, was an unspoken reality. In 1950s Cincinnati, ‘no one “came out” except drag queens and the campy peroxided waiter at the diner’, he writes in the first chapter of The Loves of My Life. That blanket of near-silence doesn’t seem to have inhibited him much. He was sexually precocious from the age of 12, as his autobiographical novel A Boy’s Own Story (1982) first suggested. But it may account for the determined frankness with which he has treated sex in both his fiction and memoirs. For an author who came of age in pre-liberation America, erotic candour has always been a political act, at least in part – never merely profligate.

Andy Warhol’s legacy has been dogged by rows over authenticity more than that of any other modern artist. Warhol might well have predicted the chaos and even delighted in it. He once signed a fake painting at Christie’s – four silkscreened Jackie Kennedys – for the hell of it. ‘I don’t know why I ever did,’ he wrote in his diary – and yet the confession makes clear that he maintained a distinction, in the end, between what was fraudulent and what was his. You can’t sign a fake if everything is real. The task of the Andy Warhol Authentication Board – established in 1995 by the foundation which handles the artist’s vast legacy – was to uphold that distinction, preserving the integrity of his corpus.