“... glimmering at the end of this dark tunnel.’ Inside, Harold Nicolson reviewed The Waves and Vita Sackville West, who seems to have had a whole page to herself, explained ‘How to plant and design beds’. By December the circulation had plummetted from 160,000 to under 20,000: the paper was losing £340 a week. ‘We shall win; or at least we shall ...”

“... my sweet​ , how glad I am that we are not rich,’ Harold Nicolson wrote to his wife, Vita Sackville-West, after a visit to Cliveden in 1936, complaining about the ‘ghastly unreality about it all … like living on the stage of the Scala theatre in Milan’. The Nicolsons were hardly impoverished – they’d moved into Sissinghurst Castle ...”

“... nicknames – Tommy, Kit. They were no longer criticised for wearing androgynous clothes; indeed, Vita Sackville-West’s land girl uniform brought on ‘wild spirits’ and, Souhami notes, soon afterwards she seduced Violet Trefusis.In 1917 Stein and Toklas volunteered to distribute hospital supplies for the American Fund for the French Wounded. They ...”

“... Bloomsbury are discussed. Though one cannot agree with Louise de Salvo that Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West’s affair ‘became the most significant and longlasting in each of their lives’, Sackville-West certainly was for a time muse to Woolf. Woolf wrote Orlando for her, one of the lightest and most ...”

“... and Darbishire), artists (Bell, Cohen, Knight) or authors (Allingham, Blyton, Compton-Burnett, Sackville-West and Sitwell), topped off with occasional politicians (Astor, Bonham Carter and Lady Lloyd-George) and royals (Princess Marina, Queen Victoria Eugénie, the Princess Royal). Vera Brittain, Ivy Williams (‘the first woman to be called to the English ...”