As her cat Tea-Cup furtively sashays across the kitchen table in her seaside house in Margate, Tracey Emin can barely contain her excitement at her new 90-work show, A Second Life, at Tate Modern.

Then she was surviving on £1-an-hour wages in a sex shop. The Tate show documents the highs and the lows of Tracey, but is mostly a joyous validation for Britain’s greatest female artist through her ...