A time-wasting mountain of kiss-and-tell

With Rudolf Nureyev, of all people, 'authorised biography' is a suspect concept. 'Authorisation' was a red rag to the fabulous, prototype ballet defector.

The authorities approving Julie Kavanagh's gargantuan (787 pages) new biography are not the Soviets but the even more hydra- headed foundations set up on his death in 1993, in which the relatives and groupies have interests. Kavanagh's jockstrap biography of the choreographer Frederick Ashton was very readable, but kiss-and-tell doesn't work with someone whose dirt was spilled years ago. Rudolf Nureyev: The Life (Fig Tree/Penguin £25), trailing in after Diane Solway's authoritative 1998 biography Nureyev, reads like a 3am Girl searching for the last tit-bits rather than a big new picture.

Test your nerve with pages 339 ("he was ferociously passive") and 501 (fist-fucking on the bar). Page 402's vignette ("daisy-chains of fucking and sucking") is sourced from an "internet comment", if you please. Wading through her lush-lipped treatment of the Margot-Rudolf maybe-liaison and the many

maybe-lovers of both sexes, you thirst for a worthwhile fact in all the innuendoes.

Basic errors undermine witnesses: Nureyev can't have heard Yakov Flier playing the violin (he was a pianist), and his adored teacher died a year earlier than Kavanagh states. Her chronology skates over important career events, but lingers lovingly over 18-month screws. In all the ribald gossip of parties with Jagger, Warhol, etc, we have no sense that one guest got to the studio each morning.

Yet Nureyev was as obsessive about civilising himself as a dancer as he was careless about being an animal offstage. Solway (still available online) got the lovers, KGB and Aids stuff, but constantly asked fellow dancers to define his awesome status. Kavanagh seeks eagerly to find that elusive grail of Nureyeviana, the secret child, not to find the elusive Nureyev. It's so time-wasting - if, that is, you want anything more than a mountainous magazine article.