Lust in a hot climate

This sprightly book recounts the life of Idina Sackville, the author’s great-grandmother. A glamorous aristocrat with a penchant for scandal, she married and divorced five times and was a protagonist of the Happy Valley set, the coterie of dim and adulterous cocktail-swiggers who achieved notoriety in inter-war Kenya (pronounced Keenya). Idina was not beautiful — according to Frances Osborne she possessed ‘a shotaway chin’ — but she had what it took. Painted by Orpen and photographed by Beaton, she epitomised the androgynous, indifferent chic of the age.

Her father, the eighth Earl de la Warr, abandoned the marital home when Idina was four for an actress he met at the Bexhill-on-Sea music hall, leaving the cuckolded countess to seek refuge in the arms of George Lansbury. Osborne explains, ‘Among a significant tranche of the Edwardian upper classes, adultery was rife.’ One wonders where it is not rife. Idina ‘came out’ in the hot, turbulent summer of 1911, embarking on the husbands swiftly thereafter.