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Episode details

Radio 4,29 Oct 2023,15 mins

1: The Reinvention of Giles Flint-Greenfield

The State of the Art

Available for over a year

Ed Stoppard kicks off William Boyd's savagely funny short story series skewering the contemporary art world. Giles Flint-Greenfield, a St James' art dealer with a penchant for post-war British watercolours, is finding his world rather small. But when Ludo Abernathy, an old and far more successful art dealer friend, cuts him in on the mother of a deal, new and potentially terrifying horizons open up for him in East London. All too soon Giles has swapped his tweed for black leather, and St James’ for a car maintenance shop, and is feeling very much out of his depth among the art lovers of Leyton. Not least because he isn’t quite sure how Ludo is making him so much money…. Reader: Ed Stoppard. Other readers in the series: Tom Hollander, Adrian Scarborough, Julian Rhind-Tutt, Hayley Atwell. Writer: William Boyd is the author of 17 novels, including A Good Man in Africa, winner of the Whitbread Literary Award and the Somerset Maugham Award; An Ice Cream War, winner of the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize and shortlisted for the Booker prize; Any Human Heart, winner of the Prix Jean Monnet; and Restless, winner of the Costa Novel of the Year Producer: Justine Willett

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