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In the 1906 general election - a landslide defeat for the Conservatives - the constituency of Henley, then South Oxfordshire, was won by a Liberal named Philip Morrell. I wouldn't have known this about Boris Johnson's predecessor had I not been trawling the Times Archive for his wife, the arts patroness and salonière Lady Ottoline Morrell.

We first discover Lady Ottoline - daughter of Lady Bolsover and sister of the Duke of Portland - in January 1902, in an announcement of her forthcoming marriage. With her husband or her daughter Julian, she appears over the next three decades. She sells her pearls (originally part of French royal family jewels), supports Lenin's ambassador to London, is reported in Riviera Notes as having left Mentone for Naples and Rome, thus missing a brilliant polo season.

None of this offers much of a clue about what she had become. Her country home in Garsington became a refuge for most of Britain's artists and intellectuals fleeing various wars, marriages and disappointments - or pursuing Dora Carrington.

So it isn't until her obituary in April 1938, that we are permitted a glimpse of the real Ottoline Morrell. But this exercise in reading between the lines was worth the wait. After the announcement of the death we read: “Of her, a correspondent writes: A life-long struggle against ill-health had impeded the literary productiveness which she desired.”

Then, “a beauty as a girl, she became more and more striking as her character moulded her distinction”. What this may mean is suggested by an addition from Lady Oxford, couched in the language of Alan Bennett, that, “her appearance was both original and arresting, and every artist wanted to paint a portrait of her, and most of them did”.

Lady Ottoline's appetite for literary Bohemianism was explained thus: “At too young an age Thomas à Kempis dominated her mind and she felt it a duty to renounce all pleasant things...” Somehow she survived, and her tea parties “collected talents both unsoiled and well worn in an atmosphere which the hostess still created in spite of growing deafness”.

And so she lived “refined, gentle and kind to all, in spite of defying every hollow social convention” - although the correspondent fails to note exactly which conventions were defied, and how. Her memorial service attracted Cecil Beaton, a “Mrs V. Woolf (also representing Mr T.S. Eliot” and Walter de la Mare.

We last find her gracing a special photographic page on September 1, 1938. Underneath pictures of the building of the liner Queen Elizabeth, is her portrait, painted by Augustus John in 1919 and lent to the Tate Gallery. “Arresting” is the word.

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