Lucky Kunst

These days artists like Damien Hirst and Tracy Emin are big business and major celebrities. But Gregor Muir knew them at the start of their careers - before people even talked about a movement called YBA. His unique memoir is the first history of the birth of the Young British Artists, and a slice of London subculture. Muir - who now runs a major London gallery - describes himself accurately as YBA's "embedded journalist". He was the only writer who happened to be in Shoreditch and Hoxton at the time when the White Cube Gallery was founded, and at that unique moment of recent history when a remarkable array of young artists - Hirst, the Chapman brothers, Sarah Lucas, Rachel Whiteread, Sam Taylor-Wood - all came together to produce a fresh, irreverent, wacky and quickly enormously popular form of art. Often it was notorious - Hirst's shark, Whiteread's House, Lucas's two fried eggs and a kebab - and incredibly newsworthy. Their hedonistic riotous world grew up in a then forgotten, down-at-heel part of East London. Back then Shoreditch was full of squats and grotty pubs, not groovy nightclubs. Muir tells the history of YBA up to the seminal Sensation show at the Royal Academy - a picaresque, hilarious story never before told. An Ian Sinclair for the modern art world, this is a memorable and unique piece of modern history. Gregor Muir now runs a London art gallery.