Lynn Barber

He Was Disgusted by a Steak Tartare

Tricks of Memory

By

Weidenfeld & Nicolson 280pp order from our bookshop

Everything about this book is endearing but most especially the jacket photograph of the author as an infant. Naked, girlish, shiny-haired, he poses on a rock like a water baby and contemplates his foot. It is a charming portrait – but one that any normal chap would have destroyed on sight. The fact that Perry prints it on his dust jacket, and with the inviting caption ‘Naked to mine enemies’ (a masochist’s plea if I ever heard one) serves as advertisement that this is not the autobiography of a normal chap. Hooray for that.

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