The Baroness: The Search for Nica, the Rebellious Rothschild by Hannah Rothschild: review Hannah Rothschild was 11 when, in 1973, she discovered she had a great aunt Pannonica de Koenigswarter - "Nica" - who hung out in New York bars with musicians, had been arrested for drug possession, was the inspiration for many songs including Thelonious Monk's Pannonica, and in whose apartment Charlie Parker had died. Able to glean little from her family about this curious figure, Hannah was 23 when she at last met "the baroness." "Wild," growled Nica, now aged 72, when her niece phoned to ask if they might meet. Come to the club downtown after midnight. When Nica arrived in her Daimler, equipped with fur coat and cigarette holder, Hannah knew there was no turning back. A film-maker who has already explored her relation's extraordinary life in a documentary called The Jazz Baroness, Hannah's touching and insightful book is as much concerned with her 30-year pursuit of Nica as with the elusive woman herself. "At the heart of my search," she writes, "was a question... are we forever trapped in layers of inherited attitudes and ancient expectation?" What follows is a meditation on the impossibility of escaping from one's family, especially if you belong to one of the most successful banking dynasties in the world. Appropriately enough for someone who would live by night and be drawn to the flames, Pannonica was named after a moth: her father, Charles, was an entomologist and the childhood home, Tring Park in Aylesbury - one of the "huge three-dimensional calling cards" built by the Rothschilds to announce their arrival - also housed her uncle Walter's private collection of stuffed kangaroos, whales and giant tortoises. Nica would later live in what Hannah calls "an animated version" of Tring Park, when she shared her modest New Jersey house with 300 or so cats. Following her early marriage to a diplomat, Baron Jules de Koenigswarter, Nica entered another airless world. The Baron was an obsessive timekeeper while Nica lived by her own rhythms: after hearing a recording of Duke Ellington's symphony Black, Brown and Beige in 1943, she "got the message that I belonged where that music was." Her second epiphany came several years later when she heard a recording of "Round Midnight by Monk, as a result of which she left her "bullshit" life - including her five children - and began her pursuit of the musician: she belonged where that man was. Appropriately enough for someone "whose first language was silence," Thelonious was named after a seventh-century Benedictine monk. Nica may or may not have been Monk's lover - he described his wife and his patroness as his "black bitch" and his "white bitch" - but he was certainly her obsession. "I have noticed," as Hannah puts it, "that the Rothschilds often fix on a subject with absolute, single-minded determination," and while her father fixed on insects and other Rothschilds have fixed on pictures or porcelain, Nica fixed on Monk. From a family of collectors, Nica collected live jazz. She absorbed herself in something "she could not own," except that she did, in many ways, own Monk: a drug addict and schizophrenic who was continually losing his licence to perform, the backing of the baroness made his career possible. She booked his venues, bailed him out, and believed in him. Nica emerges as less courageous than co-dependent: her belief in freedom was outweighed by her need to be needed. Whether Monk ever saw her as more than his "white bitch" is not clear. It is the similarities rather than the differences between Nica and Monk that fascinate Hannah: he was black in the age of segregation while her family, three generations before, had lived as pariahs in Frankfurt's Jews" Lane. Both were outsiders and also addicts: "Monk was addicted to drugs, Nica was addicted to Monk," and Hannah, she notes herself, is addicted to Nica. After Monk's death in 1982, Nica became "the Miss Havisham of bebop," surrounded by her cats and Monk memorabilia in a museum of her own. The Baroness: The Search for Nica, the Rebellious Rothschild by Hannah Rothschild 320PP, Virago t £18 (PLUS £1.25 p&p) Buy now from Telegraph Books (RRP £20, ebook £9.49)