It is to Peter Quennell in his memoir The Wanton Chase that D.J. Taylor owes his concept of wartime London’s ‘Lost Girls’: ‘adventurous young women who flitted around London, alighting briefly here and there, and making the best of any random perch on which they happened to descend’. They were courageous, living ‘without any thought for past or future’ in that bomb-blasted city, but what most touched Quennell’s heart was ‘their air of waywardness and loneliness’.