'This is a moving and funny book, an extraordinary book, richly exposed to the Home Counties, in touch with the world created by Proust, and yet not in the least old-fashioned or archaic. He was the son of an impresario and dandy, and a maddening comic masterpiece of a mother. For some, the memoir may seem to conform to a pattern of compulsive behaviour which gets a lot of attention these days: the boy makes lists, which include one of royal mistresses, drawn up in ignorance of what royal mistresses did'