[The following review briefly assesses Kavanagh's depiction of Frederick Ashton and his world in Secret Muses.]

All this is fitting in a choreographer whose ballets are themselves regarded as quintessentially English—in the loose sense of the word. The qualities so often noted in them—their understatement, their lyricism, their tenderness, elegance and wit—are the very things that shrivel in the blast of professional absolutism. To anyone not acquainted with English manners, and especially with the high frivolity cultivated in sophisticated circles during the 1920s and 1930s (Ashton's formative decades) he seemed merely amateurish, even silly. Balanchine, rooted in the great Russian tradition, never took him seriously.

And yet, although Ashton stood in awe of Balanchine's training at the Maryinsky school, and lamented his own attenuated and hampered attempts to learn ballet, in his own way he was rooted too. As a boy in Peru, where his father was a businessman, he had seen Pavlova, and was enslaved. From then on he wanted to recreate her spirit, her expressiveness of line and gesture, her play of hand and eye and throat and upper body. It was a language—he would have said "poetry"—which he felt belonged essentially to women. And yet, as Ms Kavanagh demonstrates, it expressed also his own homosexual romanticism. He loved it wherever he met it, whether in Pavlova on stage, or at her tea-table in Hampstead. In fact he drew equally from the world outside the ballet, a vanished world of grand ladies and houses (much dwelt upon here) where the poise of a cigarette was the equivalent of a pirouette—a fact which, he knew, put many of his ballets outside the range of modern performers.

A large part of this book is also about the young men who, increasingly, became the "secret muses" of the title. Pavlova, Tamara Karsavina and Fonteyn are no secret, but Ms Kavanagh has uncovered much material about Ashton's male loves. On the whole, beyond what they tell us about Ashton's endless quest for something impossibly rare and beautiful—the quest itself being everything—the men themselves are the least interesting part of an already long and minutely researched book. In her "Afterword", Ms Kavanagh concedes that they may be a red herring in the task of understanding the ballets they inspired, but she more than makes up with her full and eloquent accounts of Ashton's choreography, difficult as that is to convey.