Twenty three years ago, Vivian Stanshall tragically died in a fire, trapped in a north London flat. Drunk, he slept through his own death. Vivian was the ineffable, unflappable, elegant, and irreverently funny frontman and songwriter for the Bonzo Dog Dada Band, a group of art students who created a band unlike any other. They are still adored by thousands long after their short time in the sun was knocked on the head by Vivian himself.

"We were art students. We were Dada. We were making fun of the worst excesses of rock 'n roll. One day I looked around to discover we'd become what we were parodying," he once reflected.

Written by his wife of 18 years, herself an artist, this is a behind-the-scenes, beneath-the-sheets, under-the-bed tale of an actual genius—few who admired him would disagree. In many ways, this is Vivian through his own private words gleaned from his personal journals.

The book is also full of up-close and revealing portraits of legends: Keith Moon, John Lennon, Paul McCartney, Jimi Hendrix, George Harrison, Steve Winwood, Stephen Fry, Michael Palin, John Peel, Joe Cocker, and so many more. But even more than all that, it’s an ART BOOK: crammed full of Vivian’s paintings, sketches, unpublished family photos, letters, and poems.

Vivian Stanshall was the last of the true Bohemians. This is also a tale of Dada, a mad, sad, glad voyage through life on a grand scale made by one of England’s greatest treasures: the genius who was Vivian Stanshall.

A modern classic, Einstein’s Dreams is a fictional collage of stories dreamed by Albert Einstein in 1905, when he worked in a patent office in Switzerland. As the defiant but sensitive young genius is creating his theory of relativity, a new conception of time, he imagines many possible worlds.

In one, time is circular, so that people are fated to repeat triumphs and failures over and over. In another, there is a place where time stands still, visited by lovers and parents clinging to their children. In another, time is a nightingale, sometimes trapped by a bell jar.

Now translated into thirty languages, Einstein’s Dreams has inspired playwrights, dancers, musicians, and painters all over the world. In poetic vignettes, it explores the connections between science and art, the process of creativity, and ultimately the fragility of human existence.