"I wanna be a lion," Gertrude Stein announced to her brother Leo ... and "sweet" kept a diary reminiscent of her daughter's long-winded and oversimplified writing. Gertrude's childhood, while ...

Gertrude Stein, as Francesca Wade puts it in this masterpiece of biography, was a character of “bewildering contradictions”. Depending on who you spoke to, she was either a genius or a charlatan.