“An expert at penetrating the glorious, and inglorious, surfaces of our planet, as a stylist he was a revolutionary, entirely self-taught. In appearance he was someone you could pass in the street without realising anyone had gone by, yet his self-effacing quality, which enabled him to observe unnoticed, concealed extraordinary glamour. For more than 20 years he spied for the British government. He raced Bugattis before the war, lived in Ibiza after it, and was a crack shot, flamboyant host, and businessman with Mafia connexions, leading a life of such self-pleasing hedonism that his existence at times was closer to a rock star’s than anyone else’s.”
The Semi-Invisible Man by Julian Evans
I would wager hardly one in 1,000 well-read people today could identify the writer in question. Taken from Julian Evans’s magisterial and indispensable biography The Semi-Invisible Man (2008), the passage refers to the author of Naples ’44: An Intelligence Officer in the Italian Labyrinth (1978). Presented in the form of a wartime diary, the book describes a city devastated by Allied air raids whose destitute population subsisted on scavenging, the black market, sex work, acting as police informants and crumbs scattered by the Mafia.
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