In this remarkable book, Harold Acton writes a witty and vivid account of his first thirty-five years of his life from his boyhood among the international colony of dilettanti in Florence before the First World War, to his maturity when he discovered his spiritual home in Peking before the old Chinese culture was destroyed. Between the two, he was one of the brilliant generation up at Oxford just after the war and afterwards moved to Paris where he knew many of the literary and artistic figures of the time. It is an outstanding memoir, regarded by many as a classic.