The autobiography of James Lees-Milne. We see him as a flimsy, pious child re-enacting with rotten fish before his astonished father the story of Tobias, while the angel makes off with the loot. We watch him start at prep school with an entrance so absurd it haunts him until the day he leaves. Disgraceful scenes at a roadhouse in Bray led to an early exit from Eton, and he drives his Mitford friends' egregious "Farv" almost to apoplexy. His life is beset by ogres: among them his luckless father, a good man with limited horizons; "numb with dismay" he sees Maurice Hastings go after-dinner shooting at the private parts of statues at Rousham Park. But one monster at any rate, the odious martinet Sir Roderick Jones, is satisfyingly worsted with unexpected help from the Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin.