His personal life was an odd business. He was never comfortable in the public eye, and hated being away from home. Camp and effete, he was to all appearances homosexual. Yet all Parry’s sleuthing fails to uncover evidence of any affairs with men, and his closest relationships were all with women, most of them of a mothering rather then sex-goddess kind. At his lowest ebb in the early 1970s, he had the supreme good fortune to meet his magnificent wife Deborah, a young Australian painter, who gave him not only a beloved daughter but also the support, companionship and stability that made his later years his happiest.

Meticulous, authoritative and unflappable, Parry has done an excellent job in elucidating this fascinating but somewhat tiresomely self-centred and over-sensitive man. Her authoritative biography will join Julie Kavanagh’s portrait of Ashton and Meredith Daneman’s of Fonteyn as primary sources for the study of British ballet. Now we need someone to do a similarly thorough job on the mother of them all, Ninette de Valois.

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