In between the two world wars, a group of lesbian expatriate women from the US and UK found freedom in Paris to explore and foster creativity. They dressed differently and lived and loved with abandon. Some are well known to us today, like Gertrude Stein, some have been forgotten, among them Sylvia Beach, who took a risk and published James Joyce’s Ulysses when no one else would touch it.

In this conversation biographer Diana Souhami revisits these free spirits who sought creative fulfillment and sexual liberation through a bold new movement of artistic experimentation that would come to be known as Modernism and would include giants of the twentieth century.