Sybille Bedford: The novelist Sybille Bedford's surname - very English, rather colourless - was deceptive. Bedford, who has died aged 94, underwent a brief marriage of convenience to an English man in 1935, but she was born in Charlottenburg, an area of Berlin, the daughter of a German nobleman and an Italian princess.
Her parents latterly lived apart and, on her father's death, the seven-year-old Sybille rejoined her mother in Rome, then moving to London "for an education which did not take place".
Mother-daughter relationships for Bedford were deep and maddening - with flakes of farce and comedy - and they pervade her three autobiographical novels: A Favourite of the Gods (1963), A Compass Error (1968) and Jigsaw (1989).
The idea that she was "educated privately" is also enigmatic. Actually, she learnt from her father, a connoisseur of wines, and from her cousins.
From her sophisticated but erratic mother, she sensed the nature of life: marvellous plans, disappointments, the delights of self-discovery, dramatic non-sequiturs, ambiguous goals and rewards. She relished friendship, literature, good talk and careful cooking.
Travel, too, galvanised an imagination swiftly tuned to human oddity, as did her lifelong friendship with Aldous Huxley, whose biography she published in 1974. At his encouragement she began writing at 16, producing three novels, more essays than fiction, never published.
Often alone, she explored Roman streets, Provençal cafes and artistic parties, books - Baudelaire, Stendhal, Flaubert - and became adept at evoking the raptures and betrayals of youth.
The war enforced her departure to America, but she later returned to London and renewed travels. To her novels must be added The Sudden View (1953, later revised as A Visit to Don Otavio), ostensibly a Mexican travel book but really a medley of poetic fictions, bizarre encounters, social rituals, local history and "mad, enchanting details" in vast landscapes.
In French Provincial Food, Elizabeth David's citation of The Sudden View expressed not just a passing compliment but a fellow-feeling.
This may suggest elitism - and Bedford did indeed look back to a multilingual society of salons and private trains, flawed by arrogance and complacency.
Of incompatible marriage partners, she commented in A Legacy (1956) that they at least shared a belief in the importance of society and the habit of being rich. Her imagination prospered on elites but she demanded that they accepted responsibilities.
She was outraged as much by those who from greed, ambition or cowardice toadied to fascism, just as she was by the new elites of dogmatists, mountebanks and noisy exhibitionists.
She was fiercely anti- Mussolini when Pirandello, Shaw and Pound were praising him. She was sceptical of utopias, but wanted better government; Huxley's pacificism she rejected.
Often amused by mischief and bad behaviour, she was more concerned with the distinction between wickednesss and evil, vividly displayed in the treacherous Andree in A Compass Error, and throughout the military scandal of injustice in A Legacy, her masterpiece, set in the suffocating, semi- feudal Wilhelmine empire.
Her conviction that civilisation depends on established institutions underlay her long service to Pen, the worldwide association of writers, and her interest in international law.
As a legal journalist, she covered some 100 trials; in The Best We Can Do (1958) she recounted that of Bodkin Adams; in The Face of Justice (1961) that of six Algerians accused of mass murder.
In As It Was (1990), mostly a collection of travel pieces, she also surveyed the Lady Chatterley prosecution, Jack Ruby's trial for the Lee Harvey Oswald murder and the trial of the Auschwitz officials in 1964, who pleaded that the camp was merely a protective asylum for re-education. Her responses were controlled but damning.
She always asserted that her readership was small, although Jigsaw was a runner-up for the Booker prize, and its success meant that her novels became a minor cult. A Legacy suggested a mingling of Proust with her admirer, Evelyn Waugh, and has Jamesian affinities, but she was very much herself.
She loved the oblique, suggestive, mysterious. She could readily create set-pieces - Prussian officers in mess, Berlin drawing-room currents, an elaborate picnic - but often saw the real drama flickering in hidden arbours and shadows.
No writer played less to the gallery. Often shy, she could nevertheless tell marvellously funny stories about Thomas Mann, Lion Feuchtwanger, Edith Wharton or the fastidious Huxleys in India, offered a meal of chocolates, ice cream and dumplings stuffed with curried mice.
One remembers a sturdy, trousered figure, bright blue eyes, effective and observant, the clipped voice quickening at an ungenerous remark or deference to some fashionable fraud. Always she treasured "that sense of lighter heart, deep-grooved pleasures, daylight and proportion".
Her memoir, Quicksands (2005), revived interest in the writer and her elegant, insightful work.
Sybille Bedford: born March 16th, 1911; died February 17th, 2006