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...Back in his teens, Hugo Vickers read a diary snippet about Gladys Deacon, “the love of Proust, the belle amie of Anatole France”, and how the world’s most beautiful woman had become, by 1943, a “terrifying...
...The narrative pivots on two meetings. One is with the even more famously widowed Queen Victoria. The other is with Alfred’s mistress, Wilhelmina Ricketts (ie Ellen Ternan, Dickens’ belle amie)....
International Edition