Lord Berners: The Last Eccentric

About this book

Here lies Lord Berners/One of lifes learners Thanks be to the Lord/He was never bored. So reads the epitaph on the gravestone of Lord Berners. In its witty way it hints at his range of accomplishment. He was a composer (admired by Stravinsky) writer painter aesthete and eccentric indeed in Mark Amorys words The Last Eccentric famously dyeing the pigeons at his house Faringdon in vibrant colours and for a time having a giraffe as a pet and tea companion. His literary and artistic milieu was glittering: Stravinsky Picasso Salvador Dali Siegfried Sassoon John Betjeman the Sitwells Harold Nicolson Frederick Ashton and Gertrude Stein - they all belonged to it. In fiction he was famously portrayed as Lord Merlin in Nancy Mitfords The Pursuit of Love. As social history and a chronicle of a mad-cap English eccentric this long awaited much needed and beautifully written book is to use a simple clich indispensable. Alexander Waugh Literary Review In Amory this engaging character has found the ideal biographer. Getting the exact measure of its subject throughout written in a dry wittily ironic prose ... the biography offers of sheer bliss. Gilbert Adair Sunday Times