Lost Girls: Love, War and Literature
D.J. TAYLOR
(CONSTABLE, 400 PP, £25)
Tablet bookshop price £22.50 • Tel 020 7799 4064

The dynamics of literary clans are always intriguing. While the Bloomsbury Group loved in triangles and lived in squares, the Lost Girls, the Blitz-era subjects of D.J. Taylor’s enticing biography, had a striking Venn diagram of their own. Three of them had affairs with Arthur Koestler, four slept with Lucian Freud and two married Derek Jackson, the far-Right former husband of a Mitford.

But, most significantly, Taylor’s chosen “Lost Girls”, Lys Lubbock, Sonia Brownell, Barbara Skelton and Janetta Parladé, all circled around the rotund figure of Cyril Connolly, creator of the literary journal Horizon, described by Julia Strachey as “the high priest of smarty literature”. Like many people hailed as the star of their generation, Connolly had a magnetism that is hard to understand in retrospect, yet it is ­impossible to dismiss his effect on the women he either employed, seduced or married.

The joy of this delicious book, which relies on a blitz of name-dropping and more ­partner-swapping than a Highland reel, is that being literary, people kept diaries and wrote letters. Thus we are treated to the scarifying journals of Barbara Skelton, who was married to Connolly for six years – he said they fought “like kangaroos”, she reported bed with “hubby heaving about like a giant seal”. Her affairs with Lucian Freud, Kenneth Tynan and Bob Silvers also provided mordant commentary, as did that with King Farouk, who whipped her on the steps of the Royal Palace with a dressing-gown cord.