The Quality of Love
Twin Sisters at the Heart of the Century
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The Quality of Love
Buy for $18.44
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Narrated by:
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Deryn Edwards
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By:
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Ariane Bankes
A rich family archive reveals the incredible lives and loves of two sisters who captivated Europes intelligentsia
When her mother Celia Paget died, Ariane Bankes inherited a battered trunk stuffed with letters and diaries belonging to Celia and her twin Mamaine. This correspondence charted the remarkable lives of the Paget sisters and their friends and lovers, including Arthur Koestler, Albert Camus, Sartre and de Beauvoir, Edmund Wilson and George Orwell.
The Quality of Love weaves the story of these charismatic and beautiful identical twins who overcame a meagre education to take 1930s London society by storm and move among Europe's foremost intellectuals during the twentieth century's most dramatic decades. Above all, it is a sparkling portrait of the deep connection between two spirited sisters.
Critic reviews
"A sophisticated, cultured cast of writers and thinkers are convincingly woven together through the fascination of the Paget twins, who are the magnetic centre of the story...The Quality of Loveconjures atreasure trove of characters who were at the heart of their age." —Virginia Nicholson, author of Among the Bohemians
"Taking us from the high bohemia of 1930s London to the European intellectual scene of the 1940s and 1950s, Ariane Bankes weaves a story as spirited and alluring as the Paget sisters at its centre." —Antonia Fraser
"Ariane Bankes has painted a wonderfully rich and lovingly nuanced portrait of her mother and aunt, devoted twins, whose lives and loves traversed the intellectual currents and crises of mid twentieth-century Europe." —Rupert Christiansen