A Distant Prospect is the second volume of Lord Berners's perfectly formed, hilarious, and beautifully written memoirs. Berners was a great English eccentric, a composer, novelist, painter and conspicuous aesthete whose friends included Gertrude Stein, Diaghilev and 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, Mitford wrote, 'a cloud of confetti in the sky'. These memoirs are classics of their kind. 'Autobiography of the very finest quality. Having enjoyed in the course of reading it the loudest and longest laughs I have enjoyed in the last two years I am quite incapable of making any critical observations. I found the book enchanting from cover to cover' Compton Mackenzie, Daily Mail