Nicholas Shakespeare opens this fascinating book by writing of the fascination his aunt Priscilla exerted on him in his childhood. Priscilla’s beauty was enhanced, he tells us, with a glamour akin to the “timeless allure” of Grace Kelly in Alfred Hitchcock’s Marnie. Though this jars just a bit – Marnie starred Tippi Hedren rather than Grace Kelly – one gets the point. Adding to her Hitchcock heroine looks was Priscilla’s mysterious past: she had spent most of the Second World War in occupied France. Family legend spoke of her having been in the Resistance or the SOE. It was only many years after his aunt’s death in 1982 that Shakespeare discovered that her war had been far from a tale of daring heroics behind enemy lines. Imprisoned initiall