First Childhood - Softcover

The memoirs of a quintessential English eccentric
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 of Love is based on Lord Berners, who used to dip his pigeons into basins of magenta, green and ultramarine so that when released they resembled, Mitford wrote, 'a cloud of confetti in the sky'. These memoirs are classics of their kind. The second volume of Lord Berners' memoirs, A DISTANT PROSPECT, will be published by Weidenfeld and Nicolson in August 1999.

Reviews

'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 PROPSECT are quietly remarkable volumes of autobiography. Both books are alive with unforgotten terrors and unforgiven indignities.' Alan Hollinghurst, TLS

'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

'What a great work! FIRST CHILDHOOD may well be his masterpiece: funny, rueful, self-deprecating and aswarm with larger-than-life grotesuqes, it is in the same league as Gwen Raverat's Period Piece or James Lees-Milne's Another Self.' Jeremy Lewis

'A minor masterpiece' Patrick Taylor-Martin, Literary Review

'Seldom can anyone have written a whole book about the first nine years of his life! It is so well done, so evocative of the joys and miseries of early childhood... He grew up to be the most distinguished of amateur painters and musicians, but probably he will be best remembered for his autobiographies. I look forward to the next.' Nigel Nicolson

'A wonderful read' Derek Jacobi

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