Overview

'Hastings is one of our greatest living biographers' Simon Heffer, Daily Telegraph Sybille Bedford's life contained all the grand feeling and seismic events of the twentieth century: war and peace, love and trauma, friendship and death. Her father died when she was just fourteen and her mother, a great socialite and litterateur, fell victim to a debilitating morphine addiction. A bon viveur, she roamed from country to country in search of fresh experience, with ear and eye attuned to her surroundings, typewriter at the ready. Full of intense friendships (Aldous Huxley, Martha Gellhorn and Elizabeth Jane Howard among them), a fierce commitment to the craft of writing, as well as an insatiable appetite for love and sex, Sybille Bedford blazed her own path in her life and her art. 'Selina Hastings' wonderful, gossipy biography is a gem, revealing not just the shy writer, but also the colourful, turbulent 20th-century literary world in which she lived' Sunday Times, Books of the Year 'A wonderful biography' Sara Wheeler, Spectator 'An extraordinary story' The Times 'A richly entertaining biography' Daily Mail, Books of the Year

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9781784704377

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A wonderful biography... Hastings... is an accomplished stylist and her prose suits her subject: elegant, deft and restrained -- Sara Wheeler * Spectator * [An] elegantly written, intimate biography... This is a remarkably candid, minutely detailed and compulsively readable book about a life lived to the full -- Rebecca Wallersteiner * Lady * So good, so full of naughty detail, evocation and grudging affection that you can enjoy it without ever having to read the works of Sybille Bedford -- Barry Humphries * Oldie * Selina Hastings's wonderful, gossipy biography is a gem, revealing not just the shy writer, but also the colourful, turbulent 20th-century literary world in which she lived -- Lucy Atkins * Sunday Times, *Books of the Year* * Sybille Bedford is not a household name, but among her coterie of admirers in Europe and America she is held in high esteem . . . [Bedford's life is] elegantly related by Selina Hastings -- Brooke Allen * New York Times *

A wonderful biography... Hastings... is an accomplished stylist and her prose suits her subject: elegant, deft and restrained -- Sara Wheeler * Spectator * [An] elegantly written, intimate biography... This is a remarkably candid, minutely detailed and compulsively readable book about a life lived to the full -- Rebecca Wallersteiner * Lady * So good, so full of naughty detail, evocation and grudging affection that you can enjoy it without ever having to read the works of Sybille Bedford -- Barry Humphries * Oldie * Selina Hastings's wonderful, gossipy biography is a gem, revealing not just the shy writer, but also the colourful, turbulent 20th-century literary world in which she lived -- Lucy Atkins * Sunday Times, *Books of the Year* * Sybille Bedford is not a household name, but among her coterie of admirers in Europe and America she is held in high esteem . . . [Bedford's life is] elegantly related by Selina Hastings, the author of finely wrought, literate biographies . . . It is to be hoped that Sybille Bedford, a largely sympathetic and very readable biography, will bring new readers to Bedford's oeuvre . . . [Bedford's] works are dense, exotic, rich with historical hindsight. In a life that spanned most of the 20th century, she lived that century in all its high drama and delivers it to the 21st in idiosyncratic, textured prose -- Brooke Allen * New York Times *

Author Information

Selina Hastings is a writer and journalist, biographer of Somerset Maugham, Evelyn Waugh, Nancy Mitford and Rosamund Lehmann and, in The Red Earl, of her father. She is the winner of the Marsh Biography Prize, the Spear's Award for Outstanding Achievement and the Biographers' Club Lifetime Services to Biography Award.

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