Fictionalised biographies can be an uncomfortable hybrid, neither fish nor fowl. In the case of the artist Leonora Carrington, you get fish, fowl and good red meat served up all at once. However, the facts of Leonora’s life are so much stranger than fiction that more or less whatever is done with them is bound to be entertaining. Born to a Catholic mother and a wealthy Protestant father, Leonora is brought up in a Gothic mansion by an Irish nanny and a legion of servants. Her childhood and her paintings are informed by stories of exotic saints, and Celtic myths, and horses. Leonora is a wild child. Expelled from her second convent for smoking and playing the saw, she is sent to Florence and then Paris, where her father keeps a suite at the Ritz.  Back in London, Leonora submits