A Late Beginner

The backdrop to Priscilla Napier's childhood was Egypt; the golden years of the Edwardian age were coming to an end, the First World War was just around the corner, but for the confident, buoyant upper-class English of her parents' world "the sun would never set upon the regimental band playing selections from HMS Pinafore under the banyan tree". This wonderful recreation of a time and a climate of mind - a hundred years ago - is not an evocation of place but also of the child's eye view. A Late Beginner ranks quite simply with the greatest accounts of how it is to be a child, to see with that strange, skewed, uncontaminated vision.