Twentieth-century literature is Gertrude Stein." Or at least so felt Gertrude Stein, in a sentiment that she shared with few others, except of course Alice B. Toklas. Gertrude and Alice met in 1907 in Paris, and famously shared their lives from that day forth, souls in perfect complement; two magnificently eccentric and idiosyncratic women who became a legendary entity, and who were photographed by Man Ray and Cecil Beaton, painted and fêted by Picasso, and visited by writers such as Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Eliot. Theirs is a fascinating story, and they have found a wonderful and oddly sympathetic chronicler in Diana Souhami, whose book The Trials of Radclyffe Hall met with critical acclaim, and who proves the perfect counterfoil to the "Steins." Her own touch of genius is barely to consider Gertrude's grand oeuvre, sparing the rod to an already spoiled child and freeing her readership from the unpalatable fare that she generally served up (by contrast, Alice was a dedicated and talented cook). Literary success came late to Stein--she was 57 when The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas was published--but, like Edith Sitwell, she became, to use a Leavis phrase, more a figure in the history of publicity; the curious thing is that one senses that behind the rhetoric she knew it. After Stein's death in 1946, Toklas became the classic devoted author's widow, finally dying just short of her 90th birthday. She was buried with Gertrude in Pè