As literary editor of the New Statesman in the 1970s, Claire Tomalin was one of the most distinguished figures in what is often now looked back on as a golden age of London literary journalism. But she had ambitions beyond the editorial chair, and went on to establish herself as a productive, accomplished and unusually wide-ranging literary biographer. Her book on Mary Wollstonecraft is an important text for feminist politics, and with her book on Jane Austen she accomplished that rarest of biographical feats, saying something new and indispensable about the greatest of all English novelists. Her books on Hardy and Pepys are also well worthy of their subjects. One of my favourites among her books, though, has a less spectacular inspiration: Katherine Mansfield.