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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."
About the author
Knight Bruce was born in 1956 of Irish and Scottish parents at the Poltimore stately nursing home in Devon, which burned down shortly afterwards. His mother left home when he was one, leaving him in a hedgerow with a tractor driver, to pursue a television career. He was then brought up on his family farm by a succession of farm workers and au pairs, the latter of whom, one neighbour remarked, " Did more than the hoovering for his father." Twenty years ago, on his father's death, he returned to take on the farm of his childhood, a couple of derelict cottages and inherited the remaining Finnish a
