Broken Lunch

An intimate and fast moving memoir, sometimes laugh-out-loud, recalling Simon Dewhurst's privileged and eccentric upbringing in an upper-class English family after the last war. He has no time for misery and self-flagellation. Instead, the narrative glides seamlessly and predictably from one disaster to the next. His exploits as a soldier, ski teacher, film extra, actor and a cinema projectionist among other jobs, take us from London during the Swinging Sixties to Scandinavia, North America and finally to darkest Africa. The ingredients for the best memoirs are many - his are blue, hilarious, and possibly worrying. This is a very funny memoir and Dewhurst writes easily with an incisive wit. He has no truck with political correctness. His style is light and airy with little moralizing about the meaning of life, but he is still capable of a good rant when writing about the state of the modern world.