Her own best invention

Lesley Blanch, who died in 2007 aged almost 103, did not want this book written. Having spent her whole life spinning a web of romantic tales around herself, the last thing she needed was a patient, dogged writer checking up on her, unpicking the fibs and the fantasies and unlocking the skeletons from their cupboards. Anne Boston, who admires her tricky subject and is well aware that fantasies can be as revealing as facts, nevertheless feels obliged, rightly in my view, to play the detective.

It was not until she was 50 that Blanch (born in 1904) published her first and instantly successful book, The Wilder Shores of Love, in which she described the romantic adventures of four European women in North Africa and the Middle East. By that time she had had a good few romantic adventures herself, and come a long way from the modest middle-class background in Chiswick where she grew up.