Roland Petit died this morning aged 87, a world choreographer of chic and erotic theatricality who blew away the French classical ideal in a roar of post-war sexual liberation. He created an all-male corps of swans for Swan Lake long before Matthew Bourne, and his roles for his exquisite wife, Zizi Jeanmaire, repositioned ballet drama upon the femme fatale rather than the virgin. Arguably, though, for British ballet-goers he was above all the seducer who almost lured Margot Fonteyn away to France (and who got her to have a nose job) just as she was leading the Sadler’s Wells Ballet to international glory. Had Fonteyn done so, the history of Britain’s ballet would have been different.

Colin Jones was part of a legendarily painful triangle. Married to one of the greatest of ballerinas, Lynn Seymour, but constantly edged aside by the brilliant choreographer who was obsessed with her, Kenneth MacMillan, Jones left ballet to become a photographer, and used his unique access and friendships with people such as Rudolf Nureyev to document in unheard-of intimacy and freshness the golden era of the Royal Ballet.

Rudy and Margot do intensely serious barre in an Italian garden, Lynn Seymour enjoys a "Loyal Ballet" poster on a 1962 Japanese tour, in Glasgow two ballet girls snatch some rest in uncomfortable chairs. The real world of ballet, as shot by the insider who became a world photographer, Colin Jones. Read the interview with him, describing the friendships and tragic dramas behind the exhibition of 50 years of his ballet pictures at Proud Chelsea Gallery - events as turbulent as anything onstage.

Anne-Marie Duff doesn't really resemble Margot Fonteyn. Blonde, fresh-faced and blue-eyed, she has nothing of the exotic, olive, Latin complexion that Fonteyn inherited from her Brazilian grandfather. And she never learned ballet, even if, with her long, lean frame and elegant swan neck, she looks more like a dancer than the rather more compact Peggy Hookham of Reigate (as Fonteyn started out in life).