Bringing great writing back into print - a Faber Finds book. 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.