Sue Roe's chronicle of artistic high jinks in modernist Paris comes wrapped in a cover of blushing red, inky black and bilious green. These are the colours in which Picasso painted the Moulin de la Galette, a hilltop windmill in Montmartre that no longer ground flour but instead served as a raffish dance hall. Female mouths are like bleeding wounds, male top hats have a silky black sheen, and an unnatural green glare alluding to that most toxic of local tipples, absinthe.

Inside, Roe's writing is almost equally vivid. Reading her account of the way modern painters saw the world anew in raw, garish tones, you might feel the need to reach for your sunglasses. Picasso, the protagonist of this group biography, follows a relatively monochrome course from the frostbitten poverty of his "blue period" to a "rose period" when his images are warmed by a new sensuality.