Having recently read Sylvia Brownrigg’s discovery of her family past through an envelope sent to her father by her great-grandmother, I have now read Ariane Bankes’s comparable discovery of the extraordinary lives of her mother, Celia Paget, and her mother’s twin sister, Mamaine, from a trunkful of inherited letters. 

It’s an extraordinary story.  They were obviously both spectacularly attractive and half the intellectuals of the time seem to have fallen for one or other of them – or both.  Mamaine had a long affair with Arthur Koestler which included a short time off for a passionate fling with Albert Camus.  Meanwhile, Celia was close to George Orwell and Robert Conquest and had affairs with A.J. Ayer and Jeremy Hutchinson.  Nearly all the men behaved consistently badly, most especially Arthur Koestler who is both the hero and the villain of the book.  Gosh !