Murder at Wrotham Hill

This will be my next book – to be published by Quercus in 2012. More news

Coconut Chaos is about how one small act – in this case the taking of a coconut by Fletcher Christian from the pile on the quarterdeck of HMS Bounty on Monday 27 April 1789 – has tangential ramifications that ripple through time.

For my first biography, Gluck, I saw a retrospective of her paintings one rainy lunchtime. YouWe, as she called it, a self-portrait of her head fused with that of her lover Nesta Obermer, intrigued me. Here was obsession, lesbian love, merged identity. Next day, out of the blue, a letter came from an editor at Pandora Press: she liked my reviews for City Limits. Was there a book I wanted to write? She’d give me a commission.

With Gertrude and Alice I played on the irony that the perfect marriage: loyalty, commitment, delight in each other til death do us part, was between two women. Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, first met in Paris on Sunday 8 September 1907 and from that day on were never apart until Gertrude’s death on Saturday 27 July 1946.

In Greta and Cecil I was intrigued by narcissism: the film star Greta Garbo, the photographer Cecil Beaton and how their absorption in each other was a reflection of self.

Hypocrisy is the core of Mrs Keppel and Her Daughter. Mrs Keppel, as mistress of King Edward VII, was ‘La Favorita’ of Edwardian high society. Her daugher Violet Trefusis was ostracised, forced into a sham marriage and banished to Paris because of her stormy love affair with Vita Sackville-West.

In Selkirk’s Island, which won the Whitbread Biography Award, I hoped to stretch the boundaries of biography. The hero is the island not the man marooned there. I went to Crusoe Island to write this book.

Wild Girls was not my choice of title. I’d called my book about Natalie Barney and Romaine Brooks, with my own quasi-autobiographical interpolations, A Sapphic Idyll. The marketing men said no one would know what Sapphic meant, particularly the booksellers. They all knew what Girls meant. I still find it hard to say I’m the author of Wild Girls.

The Homerton plug [ posted 23 August 2010 ] [ read more ]

One to One Thousand [ posted 3 July 2010 ] [ read more ]

The Courts [ posted 26 May 2010 ] [ read more ]

Swampy [ posted 13 May 2010 ] [ read more ]

Coup d’état [ posted 10 May 2010 ] [ read more ]

Election Special [ posted 6 May 2010 ] [ read more ]

Gordon’s Gaffe [ posted 29 April 2010 ] [ read more ]

Kontakthof [ posted 7 April 2010 ] [ read more ]

Crusoe Island [ posted 15 March 2010 ] [ read more ]