First Childhood

This is the first volume of Lord Berners' memoirs. Berners was a great English eccentric, a composer, novelist, painter and conspicuous aesthete whose friends included Gertrude Stein, Diaghilev and Sacheverell 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, as Mitford wrote, "a cloud of confetti in the sky". These memoirs are classics of their kind.