The Cider with Rosie author, Laurie Lee created the impression that both he and his sundrenched world were accessible and real.

The truth was sometimes different as his biographer Valerie Grove explained to a spellbound audience in Ledbury's Market Theatre.

The man who could always be found supping a pint in the Woolpack at Slad, also kept the door to his study locked, and even his wife could not enter.

After Lee's death, diaries and new details were added to the picture which not even close members of the writer's family had suspected.

The charming Lee was indeed "The Well-Loved Stranger".

Laurie Lee was far more than the inspired vagabond who travelled Spain with no more than a fiddle.

Mrs Grove has accessed previously unknown letters, journals and KGB files that both diminish and add to the Laurie Lee mystique.

It seems that Lee, an epileptic, did not have front line experience during the Spanish Civil War, but was there, willing to fight and do his bit as a "good comrade".

Because of his condition, he was assigned instead to "cultural duties" by the Communists.

His accounts of battles, therefore, must be taken with a pinch of salt. But he was a true lover of Spain, and also of women.

The young "Rupert Brooke lookalike" soon became the darling of the London literary set and seems to have deflowered scores of adoring women, often before they became the wives of famous men.

Mrs Grove said that if he had been to fewer parties, he might have written more.

Lee's biographer had just a few phonecalls with the author before his death, and feels that had Lee lived, she never would have drawn so close to her secretive subject.

After researching the biography, she felt she liked Lee more.

Her achievement is to show Lee as a highly professional writer who, like all authors, shaped his sources.

Gary Bills-Geddes