Juliet Gardiner

Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, Greta Garbo and Cecil Beaton, Mrs Keppel and her daughter, Natalie Barnard and Romaine Brooks …. Diana Souhami has proved herself a peerless author of dual biographies, lives entwined, empathies shared. Her latest book, Murder at Wrotham Hill, tells of two lives, but their conjunction was fleeting and fatal: it probably took seconds for Sidney Sinclair to murder Dagmar Petrzywalski, strangling her with a darned man’s vest that she was wearing as a scarf, on a dank October dawn on the grass verge of the A20 in Kent in 1947. Sinclair was a middle-aged, recidivist, bigamist lorry driver.

The perception of war changes, remarked the poet Robert Graves, when ‘your Aunt Fanny, the firewatcher, is as likely to be killed as a soldier in battle’. The perception of war changes, remarked the poet Robert Graves, when ‘your Aunt Fanny, the firewatcher, is as likely to be killed as a soldier in battle’.