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“... Each chapter of Julia Blackburn’s peculiar and haunting book has its epigraph. The largest number of quotations are from Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass; the second most frequent source is King Lear. Absurdity and tragedy alternate and overlap in this tale of pomp in reduced circumstances. As Lear discovered, a king’s no better than a fool when the winds are blowing ...”

“... the evening, we are told, she enjoyed the joke of posing in front of her ‘original’. But, as Lucy Hughes-Hallett explains, this was more than a fleeting game of fancy dress. Cooper was apparently so taken with Cecil Beaton’s photograph of herself in the guise of Cleopatra that she decided to use it in her passport. Yet it was not quite as simple ...”

“... This hyperactive but exquisitely fastidious whirlwind of a man is brilliantly caught in Lucy Hughes-Hallett’s new biography. It is a long book, elegantly written, full of colour and vitality and detail – a tour de force, like the life it recounts – but also cleverly controlled. Unlike her subject she does irony very well, and is capable ...”