“... Beulah, bring me my Jicky, then peel me a grape. After the Second World War, the photographer Lee Miller, Man Ray’s former model, mistress and protégée, became a close friend, as did Ivy Compton-Burnett. The often forbidding Ivy, she of the frightening pinned-up hairstyle, rusty suits and morbid-spinster ways, whose decades-long relationship with the ...”

“... Marten’s paternal grandmother, Mary Anna Sturt Marten, was a goddaughter of the Queen Mother; George VI attended her wedding. Marten’s father had been a page to Queen Elizabeth II. The papers ran stories about the once carefree aristocrat who had grown up on the £34 million Crichel Estate in Dorset but had suddenly cut off all contact with her family ...”