Cold Cream: My Early Life and Other Mistakes

by Ferdinand Mount (Author)

• New

  Paperback
  2009

  $13.30

  Cold Cream is a sparkling autobiography in the great tradition: wonderfully perceptive, exquisitely rendered and bursting with characters and anecdotes of every shade and hue. A tender, moving and witty portrait of Ferdinand Mount's family and his early life, it follows his bumbling path from his decadent upbringing in the world of 'Hobohemia' to his schooldays at Eton, and from the boozy depths of Fleet Street in the 60s to his years at the vortex of Downing Street in the 80s as speech writer (much to his own bemusement) for Margaret Thatcher. Every sentence radiates with fondness, intelligence and humour in this utterly charming anthology of an eccentric and colourful cast of people who defined their generation.

• Used

  Hardcover
  2008

  $4.24

  A pitch-perfect memoir, brilliantly funny, wise and moving, of family, friends and political life over the last sixty years. Ferdinand Mount's parents belonged to what came to be called 'Hobohemia', 'a raffish subdivision of the upper class which, like some rare blue butterfly, was to be found only on the Wiltshire Downs'. His uncle was Anthony Powell, and this sparkling memoir has irresistible echoes of A Dance to the Music of Time. It is thronged with characters and anecdotes of every shade and hue, from cucumber sandwiches with Siegfried Sassoon, and Harold Acton in Florence having his aesthetic flourishes swatted by his outspoken mother, through his schooldays, where he was taught German by a dynamic young teacher called David Cornwell, soon to become known as John le Carre, to the rampages of the spy Donald Maclean in the old Gargoyle Club; from peculiar boating trips with Peter Fleming and Sir Oswald Mosley, to discovering a fourteen-year-old Miriam Margolyes, 'an opulent tumble of dark curls and puppy fat', reclining on his landlady's hearthrug, hoping to pose for Augustus John. After an erratic start in the lower depths of Fleet Street, to his own surprise he becomes an adviser and speechwriter for Margaret Thatcher during the early 1980s, and offers us an unrivalled, intimate account of life inside Number 10 during those years. Among the beautifully turned recollections is sadness too: the loss of his grandfather, termed 'one of the Paladins of Gallipoli' by Churchill, and the unbearable slow and lonely death of his mother. Cold Cream is a portrait of a generation as well as a pitch-perfect anthology of experience, where every sentence is a joy to read.