[Review published in Sunday Times, 7 February 1926; reprinted as “Growing Up” in A Traveller in Romance, ed. John Whitehead, Clarkson N. Potter, 1984, pp. 120-1:]

It would be affectation if I pretended that the moment I received this book and scanned the table of contents I did not turn immediately to chapter twenty-four. For chapter twenty-four is all about me. I read it with great interest and not a little astonishment. It is very intriguing to know how you strike other people, and most people are too civil or too shy to tell you, and so you go through life thinking you are this and that while your fellow men think quite differently of you and not one thinks the same as the other. And what among all these impressions you really are, or whether you are anything at all, or just their sum, who is going to say? I was certainly very much excited to discover that I (who to myself appear a very quiet and retiring person, asking merely to be left alone and not bored) to the gay enthusiasm of Beverley Nichols appear romantic and saturnine and bleak.

But this, of course, is not criticism. I feel that here is an opportunity for me to analyse the attitude of youth in the year nineteen hundred and twenty-five towards the world we live in and the psychology of the generation which is stoutly knocking at the door. If I could I would write many acute and sensible things on the subject. But who am I to concern myself with these difficult and important matters? It has been my privilege occasionally to meet the critics who are famous in the pages of the sixpenny weeklies, and I have been impressed by their flashing eyes and wanton hair, and that look they have of eager determination. I have been awed by their universal knowledge and their confidence in themselves. Once I was asked to dinner by Osbert Sitwell to meet a number of them, and I sat forlorn and strange while they discussed the prosody of James Elroy Flecker. In order to show an intelligent interest in the affairs of the spirit, I asked the least imposing of the group if he did not find it very exhausting to read books for review, and with a smile he told me that he seldom came across a book of which he could not ‘tear out the heart’ in an hour.

For such a drastic operation I have no facility. The young never ask me for advice, and this I regret, since I have a great deal of excellent advice at their disposal, for I am not so foolish as to confuse precept with practice; and I should recommend them strongly seldom to read a book to the end. Life is short. When I was young I read the first five books of Paradise Lost with a passionate interest, and, being unfortunately prevented from finishing it, I have never ceased wondering what happened. Being of a sentimental turn of mind and liking a happy ending, I have always hoped that things turned out well.

But since then I have never started a book without finishing it. Not for me is the precious gift of ‘tearing out the heart of a book’; I must read to the bitter end or forever lose my peace of mind. I have read every word of this one. It is full of fun, agreeably written, with a certain carelessness, perhaps, which for all I know adds to its gaiety, but with a sense of the picturesque phrase and in a cosy, vivid English. It has life and good nature. In short, I have enjoyed reading it, and, for my part, if a critic has enjoyed reading a book and will tell me so, that is all I really want him to tell me. What else he has to say but mildly interests me.

Wonderful witty book but a lot pithier than you might expect:

http://kaggsysbookishramblings.wordpress.com/2013/08/26/recent-reads-a-brick-and... ( )

Despite the name, Beverley Nichols is male, and this is what he refers to as his autobiography, rather audaciously penned at the age of 25. He knows that it is outrageous to write an autobiography so young; he justifies it on the grounds that youth is a time of enthusiasm, and middle age a time of boredom. Better to write about the things he has seen while they still excite him.

It's not really an autobiography at all, not even a memoir. It's more a collection of anecdotes about the famous people he has met, and these include many of the important literary and political figures of his time. Continued ( )