When Robert Keable’s First World War novel Simon Called Peter was published, critics called it ‘offensive’, ‘a libel’ and reeking of ‘drink and lust’. Scott Fitzgerald suggested it was ‘utterly immoral’ and referenced it in The Great Gatsby. The novel became a huge international best-seller, a Broadway play and the sequel made into a Hollywood movie. And it made its author an international celebrity. What critics did not know was that the novel, about a military chaplain ...

In the 1920s a group of previously unconnected writers and artists settled on the remote island of Tahiti, thousands of miles from home. Tahiti was the only South Pacific island at that time to have an artistic community. Why?The introductory chapters of Guys like Gauguin show how the image of Tahiti as a paradise island was created by artists and writers following the visit of Captain Cook and other explorers in the 1760s, and then how this image was rein...