If asked for books to read over the summer, I would strongly recommend Ian Collins’s long, deeply informative and ultimately melancholy account of John Craxton’s life and talents, a great period piece as he seems always to have known everyone, high and low, in London, Athens and Crete, always with his supporters, but in the end afflicted with a desire to live life to the full and not necessarily to finish pictures, ‘procraxtonisation’ he called it. The truest comment comes from Nick Moore who lived with him in Chania, ‘Perhaps he was too gifted – like having such a large music collection that you can never decide which piece to play’. Magnificently talented, but feckless.