All families have their myths and legends. For many years Juliet Nicolson accepted hers - the dangerous beauty of her flamenco dancing great-great-grandmother Pepita, the flirty manipulation of her great-grandmother Victoria, the infamous eccentricity of her grandmother Vita, her mother's Tory-conventional background. But then Juliet, a renowned historian, started to question. As she did so, she sifted fact from fiction, uncovering details and secrets...

From his experimental works of the 1920s to his celebrated relief carvings and later 'baroque' still lives, Ben Nicholson was a pioneering and influential figure, whose style combined clarity of vision with a sense of rhythm, tone and colour.