The identical twins who captivated literary London

The dazzlingly beautiful identical twins Mamaine and Celia Paget were born in 1916 and brought up in rural Suffolk – not the greatest springboard, you would think, for lives at the intellectual heart of the mid-20th century. Yet the list of their friends reads like a roll call of literary notables: Dick Wyndham, Peter Quennell, Cyril Connolly, Bertrand Russell, Sacheverell Sitwell and Laurie Lee. Between them, the twins were proposed to by, among others, Arthur Koestler and George Orwell; had liaisons with Albert Camus and the formidably clever Oxford philosopher Freddie Ayer; quarrelled with Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir; and received love sonnets from the historian and poet Robert Conquest.

At the heart of this book, however, lies the girls’ twinship. Each was the most important person in the life of the other. Fortunately, those were the days when people wrote, and kept, letters, so that after Celia’s death her daughter Ariane Bankes, this book’s author, opened a large, battered black tin trunk to find it stuffed with diaries and correspondence. It proved a virtually complete record of the twins’ lives.

Their childhood was one of happy isolation. Their mother died a week after they were born and their 50-year-old father employed a superb, loving nanny. Their universe was the fields and woods surrounding the house and garden in which they played with their pets. Both loved music and literature, and listened entranced to their father’s pianola recordings and when he read to them from the Victorian classics. The only cloud was the chronic asthma that would bedevil both their lives. 

When the twins were 11 this blissful existence was turned upside down. Their father died, and they became the legal wards of their maternal uncle, a rich, testy man with a charming, kind French wife.