Today, the idea of 'bohemians' tends to be of glamorous, sexy men and women, unconventional and edgy, yet chic and cool. In Bohemians: The Glamorous Outcasts (2000) I told a rather different story, of the crazy and sometime tragic lives of all the geniuses and eccentrics that created alternative artistic cultures in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. They colonised picturesque districts of cities and had their own cafés, their own forms of alternative dress and their own daring and deviant sex lives. There were so many extraordinary men and women and I probably tried to cram too many of them into my book!

Yet by the time I'd finished writing their stories I'd become a bit disillusioned, not with them, but with what contemporary society has done in commercialising their originality. Quite a few of their daring ideas about the way we should behave, dress, decorate our homes, party and holiday have become completely mainstream. It was partly youth and music culture that brought this about. Western social behaviour has become more relaxed, casual and liberal as a result, but the challenge of the original ideas has been largely lost. Bohemianism became just another lifestyle, instead of the major critique of conformity and authoritarianism it originally set out to be.

One of the positive aspects of the bohemian culture I wrote about was the steadfast opposition of many bohemians to organised religion. They objected to its authoritarianism, yet they were frequently seduced by all sorts of 'alternative' beliefs and gurus. I am currently working on a book about religion today, trying to defend secularism and non-belief in a world in which not only are organised religions seeming to become more powerful in rather extreme forms, but the entertainment world is full of hugely popular films and books about the supernatural, magic and alternative worlds. What does it mean?

Related Publications
1988, Hallucinations: Life in the Postmodern City, New York: WW Norton Inc.
1992, 'The Invisible Flaneur', New Left Review, 190.
2000 Bohemians: The Glamorous Outcasts London: I.B. Tauris & Rutgers University Press.
2000 The Contradictions of Culture: Cities - Culture - Women, London: Sage.