Love is also disquiet, the brooding pleasures of doubt, midnights wasted by speculation, the frantic dance round the significance of the last thing s… - Laurie Lee

Charm is the ultimate weapon, the supreme seduction, against which there are few defences. If you've got it, you need almost nothing else, neither money, looks, nor pedigree. It's a gift, only to be given away, and the more used the more there is. It is also a climate of behaviour set for the perpetual summer and thermostatically controlled by taste and tact.

….and Rosie, having baptized me with her cidrous kisses, married a soldier and I lost her for ever.

They [Lee’s uncles] were the horsemen and brawlers of another age, and their lives spoke its long farewell. Spoke too, of campaigns on desert marches, of Kruger’s cannon and Flanders mud; of a world that still moved at the same pace as Caesar’s and of that Empire greater than his – through which they had fought, sharp-eyed and anonymous, and seen the first outposts crumble….