One of London’s leading dance critics has penned an authoritative history of the UK’s Royal Ballet, and among the pleasant surprises along the way was the realization that she was researching a living history. “The Royal Ballet’s comparative youth means it’s possible to speak to people who were there in its earliest years… And it was an extraordinary generation. Besides Fonteyn and Nureyev, it had the elegant, perfectly matched Antoinette Sibley and Anthony Dowell, the sharply musical Merle Park. It had the potently dramatic Lynn Seymour, the muse of the company’s second defining choreographer, Kenneth MacMillan.”