“Since 2 March, we’ve run only one sentence on the outside world, when John Major called the general election. There is just no room for anything else,” says Cooke.At the morning conference, staff discuss plans for the coming 24 hours (30-minute broadcasts go out at 6.30am and 2.15pm, with a 45-minute set of reports at 6pm). Today, they have an interview with Ngjeoa, the justice minister, who must envy Michael Howard the ease of his brief. Ngjeoa is trying to explain, under rigorous questioning, how he hopes to fulfil his commitment to restore justice. There is a problem, says the interviewer: the jails are empty and the guards have fled.Staff discuss news that no fresh refugees have arrived in Italy overnight.

“The American Sixth Fleet faxed to say the weather was going to be bad in the Adriatic, so poorly equipped boats shouldn’t put to sea,” says Cooke “We broadcast a warning. It seems to have worked.”You can sense within the team the hope that the crisis will be over soon. These are not just a bunch of journalists addicted to a tale of misery. On the day I visited, the afternoon broadcast finishes with the triumphant roar of the first Albanian Airlines flight out of Tirana since the crisis began. Most importantly, there is no biographical sketch.None the less, the volume provides a welcome supplement to Victoria Glendinning’s 1981 study, Edith Sitwell: A Unicorn Among Lions. Here we have the glimmerings of the soul behind Cecil Beaton’s disconcerting portraits of the lady: gallant, malign, absurd and splendid In 1954 she became a Dame. Identifications err on the side of of economy and incidents are left unexplained.

A substantial body of letters could not be included, being subject to an embargo; these include Edith’s correspondence with Graham Greene and with the Russian painter Pavel Tchelichew. Here she is, expounding on technique: “These ‘a’ (or ‘ai’) sounds are echoed, farther on more insistently and with a deeper emphasis, by … ‘In the / Corn, towers strain / Feathered tall as a crane, / And whistling down the feathered rain, old Noah goes again’ – where these assonances, while they are slightly counterpointed, are yet nearly as important as the ground rhythm given by ‘corn’ and ‘tall’.” But then for Edith “everything is permissible as long as one succeeds in getting the effect one is out for.” Comparatively few of these letters deal with her literary theory, and just as well.This is a long book, and some of its material is uninteresting and repetitive. Her poetry she saw as “traditional, descended from Spenser, Milton, Marvell and Dryden …