Malice in Wonderland: My Adventures in the World of Cecil Beaton, by Hugo Vickers

‘I hope it isn’t going to be one of those gossipy books.’

This was the admonition of Cecil Beaton’s sister, Lady Smiley, when she encountered the young Hugo Vickers, at the start of his ‘quest’ to write the biography of the great photographerdesigner-diarist and snob.

Vickers’s biography of Beaton, published in 1985, was certainly more than that – a richly textured account of the man that recognised and fixed his many and real achievements.

It took Vickers six years to research and write. During those years, he kept his own diary, recording his travels and meetings among Beaton’s dwindling band of friends, rivals, models and associates. (Beaton himself died, aged 76, in 1980, weeks after anointing Vickers as his official biographer.)

And now – four decades on – Vickers has put it together for publication. I am happy to report that it is very much one of those ‘gossipy books’. It is a quite brilliant record of a fading social and artistic milieu: the world of the once Bright Young Things, now Dim and Old, but twinkling still. If it is funny (very funny), it achieves its humour by treating its subjects with unaffected seriousness – and unforced affection. And the humour is always framed by the sense of human drama, and tinged with the elegiac note.

The Aristocratic-cum-bohemian world it chronicles may seem frivolous, privileged and even faintly absurd to stern observers. But it is a world to which Vickers is an unrivalled cicerone. Though he was not out of his twenties when the diary starts, his understanding of the nuances of his subject matter and his belief in its importance make it live.

Perhaps you don’t know who Ali Forbes is, or can’t remember what Loelia, Duchess of Westminster, did, or why we should be interested in Daphne Fielding. But you are soon swept into their orbit, hurried happily into the round of lunch parties, intimate dinners, memorial services and confidential telephone calls.

There are wonderful vignettes – a gin-and-grapefruit-juice-fuelled lunch for the Queen Mother chez Lady Diana Cooper (the heroine of the book); a summer holiday at Lord Lambton’s villa in Tuscany; a trip down to Brighton to see the nonagenarian – and, possibly, morphine-addicted – Enid Bagnold in her rambling home. The scene shifts from Wiltshire to Los Angeles, from Little Venice to real Venice, from Tangier to New York; all the travel a tangential reminder of how Beaton’s career carried him beyond the narrow confines of English ‘Society’ into the brasher meritocracies of New York and Hollywood.

Indeed the cast that Vickers assembles crowds with such international luminaries as Lillian Gish, Gloria Swanson, Julie Andrews, Grace Kelly and Truman Capote. After receiving a phone call from Audrey Hepburn, Vickers feels that his London flat is quite transformed, overwhelmed with a strange atmosphere of powerful calm.

There are any number of piquant details scattered along the wayside: how Lord Weidenfeld’s eyeballs were liable to pop out of his head (literally) during