Ritz savoury crackers are rather delicious at drinks’ time.
I love the brand name; I find it almost as glamorous as Ferrero Rocher; both tributes to packaging and advertising. I would do better to buy cheddar and herb biscuits from Sally Clarke and good quality dark chocolate bars but there you go.
This seems an example of bad packaging. A predominately pink dust jacket, a terrible title, bad typography, an enigmatic photograph and a luke warm endorsement from Lady Anne Glenconner: “I thoroughly enjoyed it”. Apparently the publisher couldn’t find anybody else who did.
Actually it is a rollicking autobiography in the same vein as Tramp Royal. As with Tramp Royal I will quote the blurb, so I can bunk off and have a drink and a Ritz cracker.
”History, high society, travel and sex all feature at the heart of this enthralling autobiography from a prolific writer who surely experienced more of the 20th century’s events and places than anyone else. Examples include Nazi Germany in 1939, North Africa and Italy during the Second World War, the Pentagon during the Cold War years and the Middle East just as oil was discovered there. At the heart of Roderic’s writing adventures lay his search for love, even if just for the night. He fell head over heels for, and married, a Polynesian princess while beach-combing in Tahiti, but when a dazzling trip to 1950s New York opened his eyes to the fact he was more attracted to men than women, he was forced to continue his quest for his soulmate under threat of danger. This was at a time when the police were prosecuting and imprisoning more gay men than ever before, including some of his friends.
Full of drama and refreshingly honest, this book is both a highly personal memoir and a marvellous obituary of an ever-changing and now lost world – that was frequently the best of times, and sometimes the worst.”
There are inaccuracies, exaggerations and omissions but it gets the gist. I don’t suppose bee keeping in Chiswick sells books. I read it, some 550 pages, and like Lady Anne enjoyed it. It has some dull bits but worth reading them, like eating the steak in a pie while fishing for the kidney. What I would really like is a kidney and kidney pie – better still a kidney and kidney pudding.