Catherine Ostler’s new book The Renoir Girls: A Hidden History of Art, War & Betrayal takes off from the author’s discovery that the promise embodied in Renoir’s celebrated portrait of the two delightful, pampered-looking girls was horribly derailed. One of the girls was murdered in Auschwitz, by then an elderly lady. The world is that of the super-rich Jewish bankers of late C19th France, great patrons of the arts and apparently assimilated, whose position was shown by the Dreyfus Affair to be fragile and reached its appalling conclusions under Vichy. It is the world of Proust and, of course, The Hare With Amber Eyes, whose characters were cousins of the Renoir Girls and whose author (Edmund de Waal) soundly endorses this book on its cover. The book is excellent and has received some terrific reviews, which word-of-mouth responses so far have unequivocally supported.