She loved nothing more than telling you the story of her surprisingly adventurous life.

From Trying to Please by John Julius Norwich.  Page 208. 

From Petra we drove back—still in the Palace car—via the Dead Sea (in which we dutifully swam, and very unpleasant it was) and Mount Nebo (from which Moses first set eyes on the Promised Land) to Jerusalem. I was greatly struck by the contrast between the extraordinary beauty of the old city—which, I felt, Jesus Christ would immediately have recognized—and the hideousness of the modern churches. Why is it, I found myself wondering for the hundredth time, that after the splendor of their medieval architecture, modern ecclesiastical authorities have such excruciating artistic taste? In all Jerusalem there were only three really great religious buildings: the Crusader church of St. Anne, that glorious flight of steps that leads down to the Chapel of the Virgin, and of course the Church of the Holy Sepulchre itself. Even this last is far from beautiful in the accepted sense of the word: but its age, its darkness and its mystery give it a magic of its own. We lunched with Katy Antonius—widow of the great George Antonius, author of the seminal work on Arab nationalism, The Arab Awakening—and had drinks at the American Colony Hotel (by far the loveliest in Jerusalem) with the legendary Mrs. Vester, who had owned it and lived in it for half a century and loved nothing more than telling you the story of her surprisingly adventurous life. She lent me her 400-page autobiography to take to bed that night, and I was astonished to find in it not a single statement or anecdote that I had not heard from her own lips a few hours before.