The Bugatti Queen is a wonderful exception to this - an extraordinary life, beautifully told. There is a fair degree of detective work, and some guesswork, in this book and Seymour manages to fill in the gaps intelligently, without ever lapsing into dramatic gushing prose.

Helle Nice's life should not be forgotten, and with this book, Miranda Seymour has ensured it never will.

This amazing woman who gained fame as an exotic model and dancer was to move
into the very male dominated world of motor sport in the 1920's. Although
her successful careers had bought her great wealth she had acquired a love
for extravagance. After a serious accident in 1936 her career came to an
end. The tragic side of the story is that in 1984 she died penniless and
alone.

I have no reservations in recommending this book to anyone, whether
interested in cars or not. This is probably one of the most enjoyed book on
our shelves of motor sport related books.

Another frustration was the difficulty in developing much warmth of feeling towards Ms. Delangle, as seems also to have been the case with her family and many of her contemporaries. The lady was a promiscuous self-centred self-promoting woman who began a successful career as (nude) dancer in the 1920s and took up motor racing in the 1930s. Her successes on the race-track were certainly commendable but she was not the only women competing for trophies at the time and very little information is provided about her competitors and almost nothing about the cars they drove. Some interesting background is offered about the Bugatti family and the rise and fall of their business empire, but their cars are referred to only their mark numbers without any attempt to describe their development or the technology that differentiated them from their competitors. OK, Ms Seymour is not a motoring expert, but that limitation didn't stop Ruth Bardon from writing a most fascinating story about the development of the car and its impact on the world, in her recent book "Automobile".

Another irritation is the author's frequent descriptions of obviously interesting photographs from Delangle's collection, but which are not included in the book, whereas several photographs that are included are not referred to in the text. The muddled presentation of photos is also irritating - some being bound into the middle of the book on glossy paper, others being embedded in the text.

The book misses the opportunity to encourage readers to learn more about history of motoring and motor-racing, especially at during that most exciting and competitive era of the '20s and '30s. The dearth of information about the dazzlingly exciting cars of the period has already been mentioned, but the same applies to their equally dazzling drivers: for instance, Tazio Nuvolari gets only a one-word description - "brilliant" - true enough, but I think he and others of his ilk deserved a more fulsome epitaph such as would have made this book a much more informative and fulfilling read.

Nevertheless, I'm glad I read the book. It is astonishing how a celebrity of a past era (as Ms Delangle undoubtedly was) can be forgotten so quickly that much of her life became impossible to trace just 20 years after her death. One wonders how many more once-famous people have forgotten but fascinating stories waiting to be rediscovered and retold.

It chronicles her intensely adventurous, glamorous and glittering career driving Bugattis, Alfas and other assorted exotic machinery in the south of France, Italy, Brazil and the United States. This with the added frisson of knowing that the girl in question was a drop-dead gorgeous dancer, nightclub stripper and wildly promiscuous.

After gathering all the glittering prizes, her life descends inexorably with the hubris and inevitability of Greek tragedy into desperate poverty,loneliness and ill-health, cruelly neglected and disinherited by her provincial and slightly retarded provincial French family, abandoned and robbed by her lover. Her downfall was precipitated by a vicious betrayl at a glamorous party when she was publicly accused by the famous and 'cultivated' driver Louis Chiron of collaboration with the Gestapo during the occcupation. She ultimately lives in the care of a benevolent French charity until her death in utter obscurity. Her plain, dull sister Solange vindictively omits her name from the family gravestone, so tormented was she by a primitive and gnawing envy of her joyful and champagne-filled life. Pure Balzac transported to our century.

But the book is far more than that. It is a brilliant evocation of the almost unbelievably reckless nature of 1930s racing. It describes the violent deaths from tremendous accidents that often resulted on the banked courses and unregulated tracks that were so popular in those days. Helle herself crashed in Brazil killing and injuring many spectators - something that haunted her for the rest of her life. It paints a wonderfully eloquent picture of the aristocratic temperament of those times, courting hazards with ease and negligence; a portrait of those rash, wealthy sons who diced with their lives among the other esoteric pleasures of the Bugatti racing circle. Miranda Seymour's economical style portrays these tragic, even spectacular deaths like so many stabs to the heart. Shocking and desperately moving accounts. The arbitrary nature of torture and execution in Nazi occupied France is similarly treated with fierce economy.

I have only driven a Bugatti T35 once in my life and that around Hamptead Garden Suburb! Yet it was the greatest driving experience I have ever had - the car absolutely alive with the nervous and fractious energy of an Arab stallion. The sound of the engine courses through one like electricity. Seymour captures this pace and excitement in her book as it breathlessly bowls along like a Bugatti itself.

I am also an author with a passion for vintage machinery and the fabulous style of the politically incorrect 1930s - such creatures as Helle Nice we shall never see again. Oh that I had had the luck to come across this wonderful story. Please God, someone make a movie of it! Do read this fantastic biography. Like the author, I too have fallen in love with the ghost of Helle Nice.