Giorgio de Chirico, born in 1888, did not share the Surrealists' overt preoccupation with the erotic, and concealed within his work are the problems of his own sexuality and the way he tried unconsciously to solve them, obsessed as he was with memories of ancient mythology, nineteenth-century German philosophy, metaphysics and the secrets of creativity." "A loner, who never formally aligned himself with the Surrealists or any other artistic movement of the twentieth century, he produced several thousand works of art, with many changes of style, including a novel, an autobiography and poems - most of them enigmatic, contradictory and controversial. He did not achieve immediate success with his paintings - praised as they were by friends such as Guillaume Apollinaire, Andre Breton, Max Ernst and Paul Eluard - yet these and his still undervalued writings have made him one of the most baffling and memorable of those associated with the Surrealists. Even more mysterious than his art is the creator himself - secretive, self-centred, truculent and ironic." "For many years unable to form long-term associations with women, perhaps because of his close relationship with his mother, he married a Russian dancer at the age of thirty-six in the 1920s - a marriage unmentioned in his memoirs, even though it coincided with the transformation of the sexless mannequins of his earlier paintings into human and even feminine figures. He later fell in love with a woman of Polish origin whom he was to marry in 1934." "Margaret Crosland, translator of de Chirico's only novel, Hebdomeros, here attempts to unravel the workings of de Chirico's mind. His philosophy was that the daemon in everything must bediscovered. In this biography Margaret Crosland seeks out that of the artist himself.