From Winchester to This

William Donaldson reveals all in a frank and often scurrilous memoir where past and present collide in a hilarious vision of his extraordinary life. The author charts his course from his public school childhood, through production of the celebrated 1960s satire Beyond the Fringe, a riotous lifestyle in the company of pop stars, actors, models, and sundry celebs-sometimes in a brothel in which he lived for a time in Chelsea-literary success and on into his drug-fuelled slide into bankruptcy and lost love in the alleged present. Many will know Willie Donaldson and his friends behaving badly from his long-time column in the Independent. He writes in the tradition of Nabokov's “unreliable narrator,” with his insightful contemplations on the memoir's often-scandalous indiscretions about-to list just a few-page-three girls, the aristocracy, former girlfriends Sarah Miles and Carly Simon, Peter Cook, Kenneth Tynan, drug dealers, and the criminal fraternity-even the rightful King of Spain. Moralist as well as mischief-maker, Donaldson writes with candor, wit, and style.