"For the first five years of my life I was brought up by someone my mother happened to meet on the beach. 'I'm going back to Nigeria next week to rejoin my husband,' she mentioned to this woman, 'but I've got a baby of six months and I don't know what to do with her..." Delia Despair, as she is now known to her many blog fans, survived a turbulent if privileged childhood as the daughter of a globetrotting diplomat and was blessed (or cursed) with a confusion of mummies and a string of convents and smart schools before attending a Swiss business school (pursued by suitors of several nationalities) and managing to become an extremely junior journalist on the Daily Telegraph. After that came a nightmare experience with a tyrannical millionairess boss, followed by encounters with terrorists in Cyprus and finally, a loving marriage to a man dismissed by her parents as beneath her. Delia has penned a fascinating, warm and very funny memoir, replete with encounters with the great and good (and some not so good), from Somerset Maugham, Noel Coward and John Gielgud to Fanny Cradock.