Sybille Bedford

Mar 15, 2025 4:46 AM

Author:Selina Hastings

Sybille Bedford

'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

Reviews

A wonderful biography... 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

—— Lucy Atkins , Sunday Times, *Books of the Year*

[Bedford's life is] elegantly related by Selina Hastings

—— Brooke Allen , New York Times

An extraordinary story

—— Laura Freeman , The Times

A fantastic read... brings a fundamentally [...] private woman out into the light

—— India Knight , Sunday Times

[A] richly entertaining biography

—— Ysenda Maxtone Graham , Daily Mail, *Book of the Year*

I found myself gripped from the first page to the last, astonished by the pace of revelation

—— Barnaby Rogerson , Oldie

Scrupulous [...] remind[s] us that Bedford had a second string to her writerly bow

—— Kathryn Hughes , Guardian

Comprehensive

—— Cressida Connolly , Literary Review

Beautifully written

—— Week

Rivetingly entertaining... A wonderful chronicle of one life [and] a depiction of a small, vivid, condensed world gone forever

—— Lucy Lethbridge , Tablet

Gracefully written, largely sympathetic, and very gossipy

—— Elissa Altman , Avenue

Hastings is one of our greatest living biographers

—— Simon Heffer , Daily Telegraph

'Preston is a natural storyteller'

—— The Times

Deeply researched, fluently written, and darkly comic, it reads like a thriller

—— Ben Macintyre on 'A Very English Scandal'

Brilliant, sad, startling

—— Jon Ronson on 'A Very English Scandal'

A terrific book and brilliantly researched

—— Claire Tomalin on 'A Very English Scandal'

Very funny and endlessly extraordinary

—— Guardian on 'A Very English Scandal'

Preston is a natural storyteller

—— The Times

Sen is one of the great minds of both the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. We owe him a huge debt

—— Nicholas Stern

A distinguished inheritor of the tradition of public philosophy and reasoning - Roy, Tagore, Gandhi, Nehru ... if ever there was a global intellectual, it is Sen

—— Sunil Khilnani , Financial Times

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