The last of the vintage wine

When Sybille Bedford was born, in Germany in 1911, it was into a world already vanishing: a world where ‘people were ruled by their servants’, lived in opulent houses (fully staffed by their rulers), ate heavy Edwardian-Germanic cuisine at very frequent intervals, took nothing so vulgar as holidays, but went south for their health, or entrained (taking their own monogrammed linen) for the major European spas. Her own family’s values looked back to the 18th century; her father was interested in mesmerism, and knew a man in Grasse who could raise the dead.

In this long-awaited memoir, his daughter has performed the same feat. Her autobiographical novel Jigsaw was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1989; it unfolded some of her story, its cast trimmed, the rough edges of life smoothed into fictional form. Now, in a book which takes, she says, ‘a zigzag course’, she unfolds more, in a less tidy but still compelling version of her extraordinary life and times.