Everything to lose - Frances Partridge

Ham Spray and Frances's enduring partnership with Ralph are focal points in these engrossing, beautifully written diaries. Here they were surrounded by the Wiltshire downs; here a succession of interesting friends visited and were visited in return: Gerald and Gamel Brenan, Eddy Sackville-West and Raymond Mortimer, and Robert Kee and Janetta Wolley whose dramatic relationship was 'as if electricity had been let loose in the house'. While in London there were visits to Cyril Connolly, lunch at The Ivy with Duncan Grant, David Garnett, Julia Strachey and Clive Bell, followed by meetings of The Memoir Club for those survivors of Bloomsbury. Frances Partridge reveals a life of such warmth, friendship and good fortune that at the close of these diaries it seems almost impossible that death could rob her of the source of such happiness: Ralph.