There is something very odd, disturbing even, about the appetite for memoirs written by whites who either grew up in Rhodesia or whose parents still live in what is now independent Zimbabwe.

What explains the sustained fascination with the lives of barely a quarter of a million settlers, of whom perhaps 10 per cent still live in the country? Is it the link of kith and kin? Or nostalgia for the colonial past? Has President Robert Mugabe, the black man Brits love to hate, managed to get under their collective skin?

Whatever the reasons, over the past ten years or so there have been at least a dozen memoirs. They have usually been about white farmers, either on the front line during the guerrilla war to end white rule or as victims of the land grab that benefited Mugabe’s