The Bolter: The Woman Who Scandalised 1920s Society and Became White Mischief’s Infamous Seductress
By Frances Osborne
Virago £18.99, 310 pages
FT bookshop price: £15.19

About halfway through this account of the life and times of her fantastically libidinous great-grandmother Idina Sackville, Frances Osborne delivers this deadpan line: “It was almost inevitable that, at some point in their wide-ranging sexual careers, Idina and Tom should sleep together.” By now, any balanced reader will have stopped trying to keep track of Idina Sackville’s conquests – “The Bonker” would have been as apt a title as The Bolter. Yet the story remains compelling. It requires a writer of skill and sympathy to rescue a biography about a fatuous flapper from irrelevance. Luckily, Osborne is that writer.