The elegant and astute autobiography of a sublime writer

Images and Shadows: Part of a Life
Iris Origo
(Pushkin Press, 384 pp, £12.99)
Tablet bookshop price £11.70 • tel 01420 592974

Iris Origo speaks to us out of a lost world, or so it seems when we first open the pages of this, her deeply affecting autobiography, which first appeared in 1970. The famous cave metaphor from Plato’s The Republic is her foreword and it gives us the title of the book. It is both appropriate and inappropriate for this extraordinary life.