This candid memoir of an unconventional Northern childhood and upbringing traces the influences which made the author into an architectural historian and writer (this is his twenty-first book). His hereditary Catholicism plays a strong role, perhaps endorsing Gibbon's assertion that 'the Catholic superstition, which is always the enemy of reason, is often the parent of taste'.
His household circumstances were straitened, although there was family money 'over the hill'. His fierce, philistine Scottish school was embedded in a historically distinguished abbey with magnificent libraries and Latin liturgy, and the contrasts and tensions are amusingly, and sometimes painfully, caught. Then St. Andrews, and then Oxford, with vacation stays in a castle in Umbria and a short Grand Tour in a Mini in the Holy Roman Empire. He admits to a welcome lack of political correctness and an admiration for 'sustained flights of irony'.
