Diary of a Genius

Salvador Dali, who was born in 1904 and died in 1989, became a legend: the world's most famous and controversial Surrealist painter. His strange, powerful vision - filled with explicit  images of isolation, distortion, madness, and transcendence - changed the public landscape of the twentieth century with greater force that any painter since Picasso.

This diary is record of Dali's life between 1952 and 1963 and was written at his home in Port Lligat in the south of Spain. Episodic, dreamy, and self - obsessed, it reflects all sides of his protean character, illuminating anything that fixed his attention; his wife, Gala  ("my genius"); Garcia Lorca; the Assumption; rhinoceros horns; Vermeer, the Mediterranean sunrise; the gold and black of a housefly; a film scenario; Picasso and Hitler; Sophocles and Cervantes.