Hugo Vickers seemed destined to become Cecil Beaton’s biographer. Aged fourteen, he “stole” his mother’s copy of Beaton’s The Glass of Fashion and, still in his teens, he attended the Beaton exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery in 1968 and another at the Victoria & Albert Museum in 1971. He saw Beaton with Lady Diana Cooper at the Duke of Windsor’s funeral in 1972, and in 1979 he glimpsed a “very, very old man” at a wedding who turned out to be Beaton, by then in his mid-seventies and partly crippled by a 1974 stroke. That same year, Beaton, impressed by Vickers’s biography of Gladys, Duchess of Marlborough (revised and republished in 2020 as The Sphinx and reviewed by Simon Heffer in The New Criterion of March 2020), suggested Vickers as a biographer to write his life. Here began a five-year-long quest that put Vickers in contact with many of those who had been acquainted with Beaton. This new volume, Malice in Wonderland, based on the diaries Vickers kept while working on his 1985 Beaton biography, shows that the experience was indeed a wonderland for Vickers—who often seems wide-eyed as he writes—though also rich in the malice that colored Beaton’s character as well as that of many, though not all of those, close to him.

In his introduction, Vickers tells us that his reading of notes that James Pope-Hennessy had made while researching his biography of Queen Mary (notes that Vickers edited and published