Blood and Champagne: the life and times of Robert Capa, by Alex Kershaw

Libidinous life in theatre of war that ended on a landmine

Robert Capa tried to drown the horrors of photographing war in champagne, as the title of Alex Kershaw's lively biography suggests, usually with famous friends such as Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck and Ingrid Bergman. Bergman was the greatest of his libidinous conquests: truly liberal in his tastes, however, he was as likely to wake up beside a chambermaid as a Hollywood dame. With his mop of dark hair and spaniel eyes, speaking a muddy "Capanese", his appetites were insatiable and irresistible, for sex, alcohol or gambling, though he was frequently penniless. "Champagne tastes... but a beer budget," as one acquaintance identified it. Not surprisingly, he always slept soundly, even in the noisiest theatre of war.

Born Andre Friedmann in 1913 to a poor Hungarian Jewish family, he was politically active from an early age. In Paris he met Gerda Taro, the love of his life, from whose early death he arguably never recovered. Capa came into the world in 1936, an imaginary "famous" American photographer to ensure fatter fees while covering the Spanish Civil War. Capa announced his arrival that year with "The Falling Soldier", depicting a militiaman from Alcoy a split-second after being shot. Posed or not (Capa was guilty of "staging" action on at least one occasion), it was the most violent image of war yet published.

That image aside, perhaps Capa's finest moment came on D-Day, when he landed on Omaha Beach with US troops, bravely wading with his Leica through blood-red water. His films, tragically, were irrecoverably spoiled in a laboratory, leading indirectly to the foundation of Magnum, the world's first co-operative photo agency, in April 1947.

Capa went on to photograph the liberation of Paris and the battle of the Bulge, before peace led him to Hollywood, which he loathed. Accused of being a Communist, gambling heavily and sleeping around, he started to show signs of what we now term post-traumatic stress disorder. A "vodka tour" to Stalinist Russia with John Steinbeck was followed by two years reporting the Arab-Israeli conflict.

While he was reporting from Indochina for Life magazine in 1954, "the percentages caught up with him", as Hemingway put it, and he stepped on a landmine. The surprise is less that he died prematurely, than how he survived so long.

Exhaustive acknowledgements suggest the hurdles Kershaw had to negotiate in four years of research for his taut, occasionally truculent, unauthorised narrative. He keeps up a convincing pace with the bravura of Capa's life and achievements, despite not having the rights to any of Capa's photographs (Robert Capa: The Definitive Collection, published by Phaidon, brings together a vast selection). Capa's legacy endures. Earlier this month, the OPC Robert Capa Medal, established in 1955, was awarded to Luc Delahaye for his field work in Afghanistan. Capa, one feels certain, would raise a glass of something bubbly to him.