Rory Knight Bruce is known primarily as a journalist for national newspapers and magazines. But in this searing personal memoir he recounts an early life of parental abandonment; his father a war-damaged Devon huntsman; his mother an aristocratic Irish ‘ bolter’ whom he first saw on television hosting a daytime quiz show. There follows his escape from the family’ s Devon farm ? to which he was to return aged forty. After university he joined the staff of The Spectator and London Evening Standard. As editor of the Standard’ s Londoner’ s Diary, Dame Barbara Cartland called him: “ The most dangerous man in London.” Many of his ‘ spats’ , with Jeffery Archer, Sir Robin Day and Martin Amis, are recounted in this highly personal journey. John Osborne called him “ A worm, like me, alone and against himself.” Martin Amis, in The Information, cast him as Rory Plantagenet, “ The compromised and epicene diarist on a London evening paper.” He was the inspiration for the Hugh Grant figure in Notting Hill. The travel writer Barnaby Rogerson described him as: “ One of the most persuasive and discreet womanisers of his generation. Depending on your point of view he was either a zeitgeist or maverick.”