Here lies Lord Berners/One of life's 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 Amory's 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 Mitford's 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 cliche, 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
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