> Skip to content
  • Published: 12 November 2020
  • ISBN: 9781473546035
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 432

Sybille Bedford

An Appetite for Life



The first full and intimate biography of writer and bon viveur Sybille Bedford

'Hastings is one of our greatest living biographers' Simon Heffer, Daily Telegraph
Sybille Bedford's life contained all the grand feeling and seismic events of the twentieth century: war and peace, love and trauma, friendship and death. Her father died when she was just fourteen and her mother, a great socialite and litterateur, fell victim to a debilitating morphine addiction. A bon viveur, she roamed from country to country in search of fresh experience, with ear and eye attuned to her surroundings, typewriter at the ready.

Full of intense friendships (Aldous Huxley, Martha Gellhorn and Elizabeth Jane Howard among them), a fierce commitment to the craft of writing, as well as an insatiable appetite for love and sex, Sybille Bedford blazed her own path in her life and her art.

'Selina Hastings' wonderful, gossipy biography is a gem, revealing not just the shy writer, but also the colourful, turbulent 20th-century literary world in which she lived' Sunday Times, Books of the Year

'A wonderful biography' Sara Wheeler, Spectator
'An extraordinary story' The Times
'A richly entertaining biography' Daily Mail, Books of the Year

  • Published: 12 November 2020
  • ISBN: 9781473546035
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 432

About the author

Selina Hastings

Selina Hastings is a writer and journalist, biographer of Somerset Maugham, Evelyn Waugh, Nancy Mitford and Rosamund Lehmann and, in The Red Earl, of her father.

She is the winner of the Marsh Biography Prize, the Spear's Award for Outstanding Achievement and the Biographers' Club Lifetime Services to Biography Award.

Also by Selina Hastings

See all

Praise for Sybille Bedford

An extraordinary story

Laura Freeman, The Times

Comprehensive

Cressida Connolly, Literary Review

A wonderful biography... Elegant, deft and restrained

Sara Wheeler, Spectator

A fantastic read... brings a fundamentally [...] private woman out into the light

India Knight, Sunday Times

I found myself gripped from the first page to the last, astonished by the pace of revelation

Barnaby Rogerson, Oldie

[A] richly entertaining biography

Ysenda Maxtone Graham, Daily Mail, *Book of the Year*

Beautifully written

Week

Scrupulous [...] remind[s] us that Bedford had a second string to her writerly bow

Kathryn Hughes, Guardian

Rivetingly entertaining... A wonderful chronicle of one life [and] a depiction of a small, vivid, condensed world gone forever

Lucy Lethbridge, Tablet

Selina Hastings's wonderful, gossipy biography is a gem

Lucy Atkins, Sunday Times, *Books of the Year*

[An] elegantly written, intimate biography... This is a remarkably candid, minutely detailed and compulsively readable book about a life lived to the full

Rebecca Wallersteiner, Lady

So good, so full of naughty detail, evocation and grudging affection that you can enjoy it without ever having to read the works of Sybille Bedford

Barry Humphries, Oldie

Gracefully written, largely sympathetic, and very gossipy

Elissa Altman, Avenue

[Bedford's life is] elegantly related by Selina Hastings

Brooke Allen, New York Times

Hastings is one of our greatest living biographers

Simon Heffer, Daily Telegraph