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''Hard to beat. I could read this sort of book for ever'' Stephen Fry ''An unadulterated joy ... Every page is shot through with anecdote and wit, so that the whole experience feels like being at a peculiarly wonderful dinner party ... Funny, astute and clever'' Observer ''A loving, lyrical, life-filled memoir'' Guardian 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.>
About the author
Ferdinand Mount was born in 1939, the son of a steeplechase jockey, and brought up on Salisbury Plain. After being educated at Eton and Oxford, he made various false starts as a children's nanny, a gossip columnist, bagman to Selwyn Lloyd, and leader-writer on the doomed
Daily Sketch. He later surfaced, slightly to his surprise and everyone else's, as head of Margaret Thatcher's Policy Unit and later editor of
The Times Literary Supplement. He is married with three children and three grandchildren and has lived in Islington for half his life. Apart from political columns and essays, he has written a six-volume series of novels,
A Chronicle of Modern Twilight, which began with
The Man Who Rode Ampersand, based on his father's racing life, and included
Of Love And Asthma (he is a temporarily retired asthmatic), which won the Hawthornden Prize for 1992. He also writes what he calls
Tales of History and Imagination, including
Umbrella, which the historian Niall Ferguson called 'quite simply the best historical novel in years'. His most recent titles for Bloomsbury Continuum include
Big Caesars and Little Caesars,
Kiss Myself Goodbye: The Many Lives of Aunt Munca and the novel
Making Nice.
