It was Diaghilev’s adored stepmother rather than his ‘fun but feckless’ father, Rupert Christiansen tells us in this hugely entertaining book, who planted the seeds of a seemingly unremarkable young man’s exceptional self-belief. ‘Never say “I can’t”,’ Yelena Diaghilev told little Serge, despite his mediocre academic achievements and lack of musical talent. ‘When people want to, they can.’ As Christiansen observes, it was advice that the monumentally ambitious Diaghilev heeded.

Having come from remote Perm to fashionable St Petersburg in 1890 to study law (and to pursue pretty young men, a lifetime’s occupation), eighteen-year-old Serge started by chumming up with a group of earnest young intellectuals known as the ‘Nevsky Pickwickians’, before holding an art show of his own work (favourably reviewed by himself) and launching a magazine called The World of Art. Inspired by the London-based The Studio, it introduced Russian readers to Cézanne, Matisse, Van Gogh and Kandinsky. St Petersburg was subjected to another attempt to improve its taste when Diaghilev pretty much single-handedly sourced, fundraised for and presented a giant exhibition of portraits of Russian notables. A future Ballets Russes colleague, Léon Bakst, oversaw the paintings’ installation in the echoing spaces of a recently abandoned palace.

The key moment came in 1906, when Diaghilev decided to bring Russian tastes to western Europe. A big art show in Paris (with Bakst advising on the design) secured praise and recognition from the likes of Proust’s friend Robert de Montesquiou; the breakthrough came two years later, when