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Though his descriptions of women often border on the misogynistic (Grace Kelly is a""big bull puppy""), the dressing-down he gives Katharine Hepburn, with whom he worked unhappily on the Broadway show Coco, is a bracing astringent to the recent, gauzy hagiography of the screen legend. Beaton's graceful writing is most perceptive when capturing others' physical appearance.

Pathos aside, the diaries gain a jolt of interest from Beaton's catty assessments of his circle (Noel Coward, John Gielgud and the Queen Mother are all acquaintances) and celebrity subjects, whom he continued to photograph for Vogue well into his 70s. Yet this unflinching portrait of the artist's increasing debility is touching-all the more so coming from a man who spent much of his life capturing life from its most flattering angle. The years republished here, 1970-1980, are perhaps the least eventful of Beaton's life, concerned largely with his declining health, loss of sex drive and the shoring up of his artistic reputation:""To the younger generation I have become an old master,"" he writes. But the serial publication over the years of his diaries brought him notoriety, particularly the passages revealing his affair with Greta Garbo-bisexual in practice, Beaton's sensibility was swish. As a photographer and stage designer, Beaton's propensity for self-promotion had already brought him a fair measure of renown in his native England.