Sybille Bedford

Chatto & Windus 432pp £25

The Week Bookshop £19.99

This biography of the German-born English writer Sybille Bedford is “total heaven”, said India Knight in The Sunday Times. It is beautifully written and packed with the sort of people “who don’t seem to exist any more”. Two such were Bedford’s parents: a “charming, impoverished Bavarian aristocrat” who collected porcelain and lemurs; and a “raving beauty” who had “affairs all over the place” before descending into morphine addiction. Bedford was born in 1911, and spent her early days at the family schloss near the Black Forest, before joining her mother on the French Riviera, where she fell under the spell of Aldous Huxley. It was during this time that Bedford discovered she was a lesbian: Huxley’s wife, Maria, was one of her first lovers. Over her long, peripatetic life (she died in 2006), Bedford wrote four “wonderful” novels (including A Legacy, her most famous work), while packing in a great deal of “sexual bondings”. Towards the end of her life she confessed: “I wish I’d written more books and spent less time being in love.”

Readers of this biography may well agree, said Julian Evans in The Daily Telegraph. Hastings, quite rightly, is a “punctilious chronicler” of Bedford’s love life – but the endless affairs become “frankly exhausting”. She was not an altogether appealing character, said Sara Wheeler in The Spectator. An appalling snob, she referred to editors as “hirelings” and, though supported financially for many years by the war correspondent Martha Gellhorn, was contemptuous of the American’s low-born ways (“I am sorry to say [Martha] calls it a trat”, she wrote after her friend took her to a Roman trattoria). None of this, though, detracts from the quality of Hastings’s biography. Deft and “heroically” researched, it’s a work that is likely to “stand the brutal test of time”.