“In this well-wrought biography of one of England’s most celebrated authors of both fiction and nonfiction, Selina Hastings’s Sybille Bedford is a work the likes of which arrive on the biographical scene only rarely, destined to become foundational.... In this copiously noted literary explication of a life well-lived, Hastings is, at once, consummate storyteller and astute literary anthropologist, unpacking and interpreting her subject’s passions and predilections against a backdrop of literature; war and fascism; food; friendships both true and not; joy, and the encroachment of age, which did not slow Bedford down, until it did. Riveting.” (Elissa Altman, Avenue)

“Throughout Bedford’s books, the depth of human tragedy lies just beneath a comedy of manners.... Selina Hastings, acclaimed biographer of Somerset Maugham and Nancy Mitford, fills in many of the blanks that Bedford, basically a reticent person, left even when writing obliquely of herself and a wide circle that included Martha Gellhorn and Thomas Mann. [Sybille Bedford is] gracefully written, largely sympathetic, and very gossipy.” (Brenda Wineapple, The Wall Street Journal)

"This is such a fantastic read...Hastings’ delicious biography, with its abundance of intricate and intimate detail, is total heaven. It helps that her subject wrote novels...that were thinly disguised autobiographies, and that the material is so very rich.... [This biography] brings a fundamentally shy and private woman out into the light and is populated by the sorts of people who don’t seem to exist anymore - madly clever, slightly louche, culturally omnivorous, sexually fluid, crisscrossing Europe and each other in search of fun and new ideas." (India Knight, The Sunday Times)