My friend Geoffrey Elborn, who has died aged 72, was a biographer whose lives of the writers Edith Sitwell and Francis Stuart attracted wide praise for their scholarship and readability.
Geoffrey was born in Edinburgh and as a baby was adopted, with his twin sister, Gillian, by Arthur Elborn, an architect, and his wife, Janet (nee Milne), a schoolteacher. When Geoffrey was seven the family relocated to the tiny former port of Airth, near Falkirk, where as a teenager he got in touch with the wider world by writing to musicians, artists and politicians, some of whom became friends. In his late teens, on his first trip to London, he visited the artist Laura Knight, took tea with Clement Attlee and, through Mary Wilson, was treated to a tour of 10 Downing Street.
