Back when he was a nobody, Francis Bacon somehow got invited to a famous model’s birthday party in Paris. She was a Vogue cover girl called Toto Koopman, part of a fast-living gang of jet-set Parisians that included Russian princes and American heiresses. They wore Schiaparelli, accessorised their outfits with live parrots and monkeys, and all slept with each other. Bacon was entranced.

He met her again 15 years later, in 1946, in London. By then she had lived all over Europe, been mistress to the press baron Lord Beaverbrook and Winston Churchill’s son, Randolph, spied for the Italian resistance and almost died in the concentration camp at Ravensbruck. Bacon was still a nobody, though that was about to change thanks to Koopman’s girlfriend, the art gallerist Erica Brausen, who launched him onto the London scene (almost bankrupting herself in the process).

The writer Jean-Noel Liaut has unearthed an extraordinary character for his book, The Many Lives of Miss K. It’s the first biography of Koopman, which is odd given how famous her image is. The photograph George Hoyningen-Huene took of her in a backless black and white gown by Augusta Bernard (for Vogue’s September 1933 issue) has become one of the era’s most iconic fashion photographs.

Have a listen to Nisha Lilia Diu from the Telegraph talking about the life of Toto Koopman