According to the veteran publisher and party-giver Lord Weidenfeld, “There is really no one else in London now who is at the nexus of so many worlds” as Santa Montefiore is.

The worlds connected by the novelist are literary, intellectual, social and royal. She is a romantic novelist with sales of 3m books; her sister is the socialite Tara Palmer-Tomkinson; her father, Charles, a former Olympic skier, owns and farms the Dummer Grange estate in Hampshire; and Prince Charles is a good family friend.