Value: What Money Can’t Buy. A Handbook for Practical Hedonism

'Stephen Bayley is the English answer to Tom Wolfe, as suave, iconoclastic, witty, visually perceptive' Fiona MacCarthy

'He has the knack of getting ahead of everybody with values that turn out to be permanent' Clive James


'He has the attention span of an acid-crazed hummingbird hawkmoth, but when he craps, it glows' Sir Terence Conran

Stephen Bayley is an author, critic, columnist, consultant, broadcaster, debater and curator. Born in Cardiff and formally educated at Manchester University and Liverpool University School of Architecture. Informally, by the motorways, restaurants, cafes, bars, airports and museums of Europe and the United States.

With Terence Conran he created the influential Boilerhouse Project in the Victoria & Albert Museum. This became London's most successful exhibition space during the 1980s and evolved into the influential Design Museum which Mrs Thatcher opened in 1989. Stephen was the founding-director. In 1997 Tony Blair's New Labour made him Creative Director of the Millennium project, but a spectacular falling-out with Peter Mandelson left the project without artistic or intellectual leadership and it became the 'crap' he so eloquently predicted.

He is Chairman of the Royal Fine Arts Commission Trust, a Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, the Honorary Visiting Professor at Liverpool University School of Architecture, a Honorary Fellow of the RIBA, a Honorary Fellow of the University of Wales and a Fellow of Liverpool Institute of Performing Arts.

His books include In Good Shape (1979), The Albert Memorial (1981), Harley Earl and The Dream Machine (1983), The Conran Directory of Design (1985), Sex Drink and Fast Cars (1986), Commerce and Culture (1989), Taste (1991), Labour Camp (1998), Moving Objects (1999), General Knowledge (2000), Sex : a cultural history (2000), A Dictionary of Idiocy (2003), Life's a Pitch (2007), Design : intelligence made visible (2007), Cars (2008), Woman as Design (2009), Liverpool : shaping the city (2010), La Dolce Vita (2011), Ugly - the aesthetics of everything (2012), Death Drive - there are no accidents (2016) and Signs of Life - why brands matter (2017). A completely new edition of Taste was published in 2017. How to Steal Fire, a book about the myths of creativity, was published in 2019.

Additionally, he writes for a huge range of national and international publications including: Spectator, The Times, Independent, Daily Telegraph, Suddeutsches Zeitung, El País, GQ, Conde Nast Traveller, Car, Financial Times, Vanity Fair and Octane. He has been a contributing editor of GQ since the magazine was launched.

Stephen has appeared often at the Hay, Edinburgh, Cheltenham, Oxford and Stratford literary festivals, spoken in universities and museums and argued, usually successfully, in debates everywhere in Britain. Additionally, he has lectured, talked and debated in: Paris, Barcelona, Amsterdam, Delft, Bucharest, Berlin, Geneva, Milan, New York, Chicago, Tokyo, Nagoya, Hong Kong, Melbourne, Perth and Sydney.

Most of all, he likes sitting in the sun.