Toklas Cookbook (1954), the book that made Toklas famous as more than just the minatory figure often posed a few feet away from Gertrude Stein. Malcolm opens with an account of The Alice B. The author never becomes as philosophically engaged as she did in her unlikely but absorbing book about Sheila McGough, a small-time lawyer who went to jail because of her legal fundamentalism and literalism ( The Crime of Sheila McGough ).

Two Lives, while highly readable and diverting, has little of the drama or intrigue of Malcolm’s The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes (1994). We are never quite sure why, for she evinces no great liking for her subjects. Now Janet Malcolm, the celebrated author and New Yorker journalist, has added to the vast Stein–Toklas literature. Their fame is an achieved and bankable thing, notwithstanding the fact that Gertrude Stein (1874– 1946) – whose books included Three Lives (1909), The Making of Americans (1925) and the wonderfully titled A Long Gay Book (1932) – remains perhaps the least read of the modernists. Gertrude and Alice has been used before, as the main title of Diana Souyhami’s joint study (1991), and will doubtless be used again.

Scott and Zelda, Ted and Sylvia, George and Martha … all those happy couples. Few names of literary couples can be so confidently trimmed. The subtitle of Janet Malcolm’s new book (published in Australia by Melbourne University Press) is Gertrude and Alice.

Janet malcolm gertrude stein