First Childhood - Tapa dura

'Autobiography of the very finest quality. Having enjoyed in the course of reading it the loudest and longest laughs I have enjoyed in the last two years I am quite incapable of making any critical observations. I found the book enchanting from cover to cover.' Compton Mackenzie, Daily Mail 'First Childhood and A Distant Prospect are quietly remarkable volumes of autobiography. Both books are alive with unforgotten terrors and undforgiven indignities.' Alan Hollinghurst, TLS, March 1998 ''Not only witty and amusing, but contains things to ponder over in plenty behind the mere youthful years. The portraits of his friends are complete portraits, skectched brilliantly in a few strokes.' Tatler First Childhood is the first volume of Lord Berner's perfectly formed, hilarious, and beautifully written memoirs. Berners was a great English eccentric, a composer, novelist, painter and conspicuous aesthete whose friends included Gerturde Stein, Diaghilev and Sacherverell Sitwell. The character of Lord Merlin in Nancy Mitford's The Pursuit of Love is based on Lord Berners, who would dip his pigeons into basins of magenta, green and ultramarine so that when released they resembled, Mitford wote, 'a cloud of confetti in the sky'. These memoirs are classics of their kind.

See above. Lord Berners was born in 1883 and died in 1950.