A 34 year-old Bristol based research scientist called Dr Brooke Magnanti has outed herself as the ‘real’ author of the Belle de Jour blog and books. These texts ‘documented’ the life of a high-class London call girl. Dr Magnanti claims her writing is an authentic record of the time she spent working as a prostitute to fund the final phase of her PhD research. I haven’t looked deeply into the various proofs that Dr Magnanti is Belle, but plenty of news journalists have and they seem convinced by them. So while I can’t say with absolutely certainty that Dr Magnanti is Belle, it seems to me to be rather unlikely that she isn’t.
One thing I am absolutely certain of is that I didn’t write the Belle de Jour blog and books despite the claims to the contrary made by various conspiracy nuts. Although the media (most notably The Evening Standard and The Guardian) ran with this story, it didn’t originate with them and I was never under the impression they believed it to be true; they covered the claim without taking any very strong line on it because it made a good story. I benefited from the publicity and sold books as a result, while the journalists in question were paid and generated profits for their bosses.
Curiously, it appears that the majority of those who made and repeated the claim that I was Belle de Jour as if they personally believed it, did so out of spite and malice. It is therefore ironic that their activities helped rather than harmed me. The endless conspiracy theories propagated by these bozos were so ludicrous – involving as they did interminable and utterly fantastic international ‘criminal’ and ‘political’ outrages – that no one took them seriously. It was even claimed that when I temporarily took the position of writer-in-residence at Strathclyde University, I’d ‘fled’ to Scotland in a vain attempt to avoid arrest by the cops. Despite the linked assertion that my incarceration for endless heinous sex crimes was imminent, I remain at liberty…
In fact, beyond a handful of nutters, no one who’d looked into the matter ever believed I was Belle de Jour. You only had to compare my prose to Belle’s to see that I couldn’t possibly have written the tedious shit ‘she’ spews out. My view of Belle’s work is that it is mindless bollocks aimed at middle-class airheads. Had I not been publicly accused of having composed this garbage, I wouldn’t have bothered looking at it, and so it shouldn’t be necessary to add I would never have bothered writing it. That said, if Dr Magnanti is indeed (as I think likely) Belle, then hats-off to her for evading detection for so long and doing something useful in the area of cancer research. Since her prose is so unappealing, she should quit writing and stick to medical matters instead.
And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!
Tags: Belle de Jour, Brooke Magnanti, cancer research, conspiracy theorists, conspiracy theory, Diary of a London Call Girl, Dr Brooke Magnanti, Evening Standard, Guardian, prostitutes, prostitution, Stewart Home
Three vampires walk into a bar. One orders a blood on the rocks. Another orders a double blood. The third simply asks for a mug of hot water.
“Why didn’t you order blood like everyone else?” asks the bartender.
The vampire pulls out a tampon and says, “I’m making tea!”
I do not believe that we are divinely destined to be drudges. We must break the rules of the rich and take our destinies into our own hands.
I didn’t read any of the above posts
“Stewart Home is my alter ego. He can read my mind.”
‘I think I’ll become a Christian. I already look like one.’
I didn’t write this.
Chumley, why didn’t I know sooner? You could have written friggin’ War and Peace and saved me alot of time, I coulda been sexting…
‘I think I’ll become a Christian. I already look like one.’
i didn’t write that
I’m a high class prostitute but I’ve had to subsidise my income by working as a research scientist. It’s just not possible for a girl to earn enough money at an honest profession any more.
‘I think I’ll become a Christian. I already look like one.’
I didn’t write that. At least, I think I didn’t. It’s hard some days to remember exactly who I am…
Everyone knows I wrote Macbeth; it was even in Frieze Magazine.
What bloody man is that!
What bloody man is that!
I am paranoid that a bird will shit on my head someday and I don’t know why…
If a bird shat on my head I’d slap the dirty cow. You should be more careful about who you’re going out with my son!
I was a 97 pound weakling until I wrote Belle de Jour: memoirs of a high class London call girl (although actually we call them hookers in The States, and in reality I was being punked out as a rent boy….)
Turning tricks is my favourite activity. I can’t go a day without turning a trick because I need the money to feed my drug habit!
But I’m a “Happy Hooker” and I wrote Belle de Jour…..
Whoring may be one way to earn a living, but it is not the best way to become seriously rich. What have we got? A reclusive billionaire life-style in London, Monaco and the Channel Islands. A media portfolio – we own The Telegraph Group, and we’ll use it more sensibly than a criminal idiot like Conrad Black! Not to mention all our other business interests – we own the Woolworths name now too, and Littlewoods, both bought from bankruptcy!
Actually Dr Brooke Magnanti didn’t write the Belle de Jour book and blogs, isn’t it apparent to everyone that only Martin Amis is capable of writing prose that bad and that tedious? However, Magnanti did work as a high class prostitute when completing her PhD and the list of her clients is a lot more interesting than the ‘real’ identity of Belle de Jour. I tell you the stuff I’ve got on Magnanti’s men is dynamite – top politicians, clerics, gangsters, spies and enemy diplomats, all at the same time. Once we get this past the newspaper libel lawyers you’ll witness the greatest scandal since the Profumo Affair! Heck, she even slept with Jack Spot, Billy Hill, Ablert Dimes and me!
Are you all stupid? I wrote Belle de Jour. I needed something to keep me amused after I retired from politics!
Actually I wrote Belle de Jour to expose the evils of prostitution. Have you all forgotten about W. T. Stead and his crusading articles in The Pall Mall Gazette entitled The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Maiden_Tribute_of_Modern_Babylon
They are all lying. I wrote Belle de Jour as a way of making cash once I was too old to work in the front line of the glamour industry!
Actually I wrote Belle de Jour and I’m still working the front end of the glamour industry, as well as moving into the back end!
they’re all claiming to be Belle de Jour coz they got breast envy, they’re all jealous of my 84 inch boobs and crave the kind of attention I get!
Got 32-28-84 tits!
I could have sworn somebody else said that!
Strangled? Leave it out Charlie, it’s a geezer wearing make-up! And what I say is earn a ton from off-the-books night work and then when the Giro arrives lie back to enjoy another SE7 dole day! There’s no place like Charlton for knocking up the fake memoirs of a tart with a PhD in complete fakery!
Keep on dancin’….
I’m the man who put the bang in gang….
Rot in hell you stupid nonce!
You’re all a bunch of asses, or arses as you limey’s say, I wrote Belle de Jour. You can kiss my ass. Kissinger by name and kiss and tellin’ yer by nature. I survived Tricky Dicky’s administration and being on the board for Conrad Black when he went down, so I’m more than capable of faking the confessions of a London call girl!
“Dr Brooke Magnanti” is an anagram of “RTD ER Mangina Book”. A thinly veiled hint that Russell T Davies and the Queen are the true co-authors of the Belle De Jour writings. Obvious when you think about it.
Having read through the comments on these pages, any sane person can see that Mobile-Home has all the big hitters covering up for him, from the Barclay Brothers via Margaret Thatcher to Henry Kissinger himself! It must be obvious by now that Mobile-Home is Mister Big! He controls the conspiracy to destroy the world, and is in fact an alien from outer space. Unless Mobile-Home is stopped now it could be the end of life on earth as we know it!
In fact I wrote Belle de Jour to explore W. E. B. Du Bois’s notion of double-conciousness:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_consciousness
In fact, I wrote the Belle de Jour books and blogs in 1966 as a sci-fi satire of a future society in which capitalism and patriarchy had not been defeated.
You’re known for your art pranks Home. This could still be a double bluff.
Having read through the comments on these pages, any sane person can see that Mobile-Home has all the big hitters covering up for him, from the Barclay Brothers via Margaret Thatcher to Henry Kissinger himself! It must be obvious by now that Mobile-Home is Mister Big! He controls the conspiracy to destroy the world, and is in fact an alien from outer space. Unless Mobile-Home is stopped now it could be the end of life on earth as we know it!
oh – I said that already didnt I?
Everybody knows that I am immortal. Over the centuries I have taken on new identities and one of the more recent was Belle de Jour. I used my knowledge gained over many centuries to compose the books and blog attributed to Belle. When you think about it, she could only be me! Don’t be fooled, Brooke is just my patsy!
dave kelso-mitchell says:
November 18, 2009 at 7:31 pm
Ha – but I’ve just realised that Nosnibor spelled sideways is ‘Nibonosr’.
Sprunggg!
- Damn, you got me, Dave. The fact that my name contains letters that can be used to spell ‘bono’ is no coincidence, either – every song ever recorded by U2 was in fact written by me also. Unfortunately, I was using Leonard Cohen’s accountant and have been forced to start writing books under my own name, and supplementing my income by working as an assassin. I’ll come clean: I killed Michael Jackson, and kanye West is just another of my pseudonyms….
completely quaaluded
Rather than being a 29-year-old lady of the night, ‘Belle de Jour’ is in fact the male writer Stewart Home, 42, known under his own name for the novels in which he interweaves lurid pornographic descriptions with high brow literary and cultural criticism [1]
1) Stewart Who?
Theorist of multiple name use [2], radical cultural provocateur [3], ‘art terrorist’ [4], self confessed strategic ‘liar’ [5], veteran of numerous literary feuds [6], skilled self publicist, and above all an arch wind-up merchant [7], Home has previously written both under his own name and under the invented female moniker Karen Eliot [8]. Whereas his non-fiction concerns have remained in the world of culture theory, his fictional themes over the past 20 years have moved from political extremism to occultism to, in his most recent two novels, prostitution considered from the point of view of the female prostitute.
His referencing, often unmarked, of previous cultural works [9] — mainly avant-gardist but also popular — began at the start of his career in the early 1980s, and continues in his latest effort, supposedly the ‘authentic’ diaries of a prostitute writing under the name ‘Belle de Jour’. This was the working name of the prostitute protagonist of the 1968 film made by Spanish director Luis Buñuel, a leading Surrealist [10].
Few would deny Home’s skill at getting into character. His back-list includes works of skinhead, gay, and occult fiction. For a time, he has had cult followings among those who have taken his attitudes at face value in each of these areas. In actual fact, he has never been a skinhead, and he has never been either gay or an occultist — any more than he is a Jewish call-girl with traces of a Yorkshire accent. The Belle de Jour diaries are the latest, greatest success in a career that began more than 20 years ago.
All of his novels have contained copious quantities of pornography, usually sadomasochistic, interspersed with cultural theory and criticism, usually arcane. Titles include ********, No Pity, 69 Things to Do With a Dead Princess, and ****. He also distributes Necro Cards, for those who want to allow the use of their bodies for sexual gratification after death. Fifty thousand were handed out in Soho in 1999.
Not known for personal modesty, he publishes a website in the name of the Stewart Home Society [11]. This august-sounding body is his own creation. So were Praxis, Neoism and the Art Strike, three art movements in which he was the sole participant.
Did you see what the fools at Principia Dialectica wrote on this subject a week ago?
“For years some media pundits and rumour mongers went round claiming to know who was Belle de Jour; some even claimed they were Belle. What do you know…But they do not have her talent, all they can do is worship violence, speak of the fetishism of violence, it makes you sick, especially when that sort of material falls in the hands of vulnerable young people. Many youngsters worship their idols who earn alot of dosh kicking footballs or rapping the night away. But as work has dwindled many people are left with nothing to do, hence the gangs who roam the streets. Violence comes in all sorts of shapes. It is horrific. One cannot have illusions about lumpen elements. They invariably join a militia when things get worse. History teaches us that it is indeed what took place in Germany (the SA, SS), in France (the petainist milice) , the list is endless. Maybe Dr Brooke Magnanti will have to get a real critical dialogue instead of doing surface stuff. As for those who claimed to be her, we send them our fraternal greetings. So long suckers!”
Of course since as far as I know no one (not even Lisa Hilton) actually claimed to be Belle de Jour, you’re left wondering who on earth they could mean – unless, that is, you are already familiar with their obsessions. Naturally, I am, and I know how to wind them up and exploit them! Prigent is thus once again left looking like a right charlie!
You bois are all very silly. I think Stewart and The Real Monty Cantsin should get together for a proper package tour of the United Kingdom just like when Buddy Holly and The Big Bopper did it.
Now I’ll have my tea and then iron your uniform
What do you mean, “Belle’s” prose is bad? If she were really someone other than you, Home, then that other person has made much more money than you, surely, by churning out some very well conceived and marketed bits of trash. Sounds right up your street, just more successful.
OK if she really weren’t you, you wouldn’t have so much chance of starting a feud with this other person than you might dream of having in respect of Salman Rushdie, Martin Amis, John Cage’s estate, or others higher up the stink-of-shit literary career ladder than yourself. (I guess you were trying to hook Alice Debord with that stupid howlings film too). Or maybe with “Belle” that’s something you were holding a door open to getting around to, at some point, when you called this constructed person’s prose bad.
As for your cheap dig at the marketing of the works as “authentic”, this is just as hypocritical as the rest of your attitude. There are many many things you’ve written where you’ve attempted to portray your own bullshit as authentic, e.g. about the early years of Class War. You knew the “truth” and everyone else was stupid, right
You’re whole self-portrayal is as Mr Authentic the Artist – whatever self-descriptions you might use.
But of course many people really are so stupid as to judge people by self-descriptions. Oh no, Home isn’t “authentic” – he’s far too sophisiticated for that. Yeah, right.
Your basic right-wing attitude is that everyone’s either in it for the money or too stupid to know that being in it for the money is the only sensible reason for doing anything.
For decades you have presented your cynicism about everything other than your own career as being the only authenticity worth having. Just you haven’t used that word, because if you did your pigshit-stupid followers would have nowhere to stand.
I hope you like hospital food.
You’re a complete and utter cunt, you know it, and oh look, here are all your little followers and copiers coming along to say what they think might impress you.
Michel isn’t perfect but he’s sincere.
For that reason, whatever he writes is far more useful than Home’s complete collected works.
Haven’t you got anything better to do with your time than make a fool of yourself here? You must be the most boring person in the world. And while I didn’t write Wombat 92 or Belle de Jour, the name you’ve used here (“Home wrote Wombat 92″) is evidence of the tedious way you operate. Virtually no one believed the ridiculous lie that I wrote Belle de Jour and now that has finally become evident even to you, we see you switch to another boring lie (which, don’t forget, was also included in the original fraudulent document claiming I ‘was’ Belle de Jour). I’m sure you love being this deluded since it enables you to avoid dealing with the fact you could bore the pants off a corpse that has been lying in a grave for months…. A hundred years of sleep has got to be more entertaining than your endless drivel. If you actually got yourself a life you might stand some chance of ceasing to cut such a sorry figure.
For fuck’s sake, don’t tell us you’re opposed to the issuing of “fraudulent” documents! You prefer them “authentic”, then?
You’ve been issuing fraudulent documents for 25 years.
You’ve done it among:
anarchists
Leninists
neo-Nazis
greens
Satanists
Christians
right-wing conspiracists
pagans
artists
sex workers
cultists
druids
Of course you wrote Wombat 92.
The Magnanti ploy doesn’t get you off the hook. You wrote Belle too, but even if you weren’t the author and VSM got it wrong, don’t think you can get away with using that as “evidence” that you didn’t write W92. You can fool all the suckers most of the time, but you can’t fool everyone all the time.
Fucking curious that you don’t want to admit to W92 nearly 20 years later, even though keeping quiet about it doesn’t net you any money, and everyone knows you enjoy winding people up and boasting about afterwards – with the mentality of the right-wing cunt ex-public schoolboy that you have so clearly got even if you’re not one. So why did you write it? Why would you waste your ever-so valuable time, as a terribly interesting person and celebrity, winding up a bunch of soap-averse petty-bourgeois drop-out anarchists not one of whom you often even bumped into socially, unless you had a very clear aim?
Don’t think you weren’t rumbled years ago. The W92 allegation was deliberately put into the VSM material in order to get a response.
It was noted that even when you were in the middle of doing your postmodernist shtick to the Guardian (did I write Belle or didn’t I?), you took care to implicitly deny W92.
However, you didn’t bother to deny what we actually did invent that was wholly fictitious, namely the allegation that you wrote a document called Neither Ra Nor Osiris: Towards the Supersession of Freemasonry, which didn’t even exist.
We employed psy-ops, you see. We’re not as stupid as you think.
How scintillating your pathetic “media and standing in front of a mirror admiring your haircut before you go to parties” life must be. We met you once; you bored the shit out of us.
Anyone who goes back and checks what I said to The Guardian will see you are lying and/or deluded (probably both). You send me to sleep. ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz….
Great – stay asleep – you’re not our intended audience here. Didn’t Home look a fool, he who’s issued fraudulent documents for the last quarter-century?
You’re the one who looks like a fool and an obsessive too. You keep making ridiculous claims and there are paranoids out there who will think you are a cop with all this talk of psy-ops. Are you nuts?