Henrietta Moraes’s long career as a bohemian girl began in the early 1950s and ended on her death in January 1999. Its highlights included Francis Bacon painting ‘more than twenty-three’ portraits of her, the avant-garde Soho photographer John Deakin immortalising her in various states of undress and hanging out with Lucian Freud and April Ashley. Its low points took in the various addictions to which lives of this kind are so regrettably subject (booze, amphetamines, heroin and so on) and a suicide attempt in which her third husband, coming across her slashing her wrists in the bathroom, was told, ‘You made me do this.’

It’s a mark of the bohemian lifestyle that there comes a time when the line between the highs and the lows blurs to the point of indivisibility. From the angle of Soho legend, breaking into the house of the celebrated literary critic Cyril Connolly and stealing his then wife Barbara Skelton’s earrings, as Hen is supposed to have done in the early 1950s, may be a point in your favour. From the angle of prudence and criminality it looks desperately ill-advised. But then who are we to calibrate the behaviour of a woman described as ‘a force of nature’ (Maggi Hambling) who apparently lived ‘like a flame’ (Matthew Parris) to the standards of the workaday world?

Certainly Darren Coffield, the author of this lively and almost terminally erratic biography, isn’t here to judge his equally erratic subject. Indeed, the adjective that tends to predominate in these accounts of high jinks at the Colony Room and the Coach and Horses is ‘heroic’. Impending bankruptcy, absconding other halves,