The boy Francis King tasted “a brine-like salt” on his father's forehead when, reluctantly, or at any rate unspontaneously, he kissed him goodnight. The taste, his autobiography's Proustian memory spur, turned out to be a malign portent of disease and death, and it is the presence of these two elements, spectral or all too palpable, which lends a melancholy consistency to [Yesterday Came Suddenly, a] busy populous chronicle of a literary life.

A remittance child, like Kipling's Punch in “Baa Baa Black Sheep”, he was shipped home from India to be shuffled between aunts and uncles; the Kings, radical Bohemians who lunched him at Rules and talked to him like a grown-up, and the Reads, gushing, ribald, philistine and supremely practical. The comparative cheerfulness of this boyhood in exile confounds expectation as much as his apparent serenity at Shrewsbury where he felt mingled indignation and pleasure at discovering “King is the house tart” scribbled on a lavatory door, and worshipped his fagmaster, Bagott, who later (inevitably, one is tempted to suppose) shot himself on the eve of marriage.

King's vinegary, no-nonsense attitude to himself when young means he gives short shrift to his undergraduate pacifism, and is scarcely more charitable towards the prankster and smart alec be became on his return to Oxford, refreshed after a tumultuous initiatory sexual fling with a Venetian gondolier, having published two novels and begun contributing the sort of Listener review in which Elizabeth Bowen could be dismissed as “a high-class sob-sister, the intellectual's Godfrey Winn.”

The happiest, or least troubled portion of the career mapped out here was spent as a teacher for the British Council. From a Britain of shrivelled aid budgets and reduced international influence, we look back with an envious sourness at the fortunate author, “seeing life” against exotically arranged backdrops, in that old-fashioned mode which combines an acceptable measure of domestic bohemianism, a strong dash of café society, and fruitful liaisons with local boys of suitable intelligence and principle.

Meanwhile, the sommités littéraires made anecdotal landfall. In Athens, Louis MacNeice, officially entitled “Fun.O” (Functional Officer), was emphatically no fun at all, while Maurice Bowra, whose trousers King tugged off with some difficulty in a hospital operating-theatre after a motoring accident, became positively Neronic in self-esteem: “When I saw that bloody great juggernaut coming straight at us, I remember my last thought was ‘My God, what a loss to English culture!’” In Kyoto, Joe Ackerley, his air ticket having been thoughtfully provided by Morgan Forster, became the author's Man Who Came To Dinner, spoiling his Akita dogs rotten, swilling his ruinously expensive Beefeater and satanically playing him off against James Kirkup, towards whose studied japonnaiseries and “creative” autobiography King exercises what might be termed a waspish indulgence.

The same mingling of tones, acidulated and compassionate, typifies his approach, elsewhere in the book, to those he befriends either during his British Council years or as a working novelist and reviewer. His strongest suit as a writer has always lain in tracing the incalculable outlines of a relationship, and the most absorbing moments of Yesterday Came Suddenly all involve the resilience or sudden implosion of friendships and love affairs, little hard-edged dramas of acceptance or betrayal.

If the names sometimes bunch too thickly (the incident involving Daphne du Maurier staring at an ashtray, for example, might have fallen a harmless victim to the blue pencil), it is worth waiting for them to thin out in front of extended portraits such as those of Ivy Compton-Burnett and Olivia Manning, drawn in the indelible colours of exasperated affection.

“It is better to be drunk with loss”, the former tells him, “and to beat the ground than to let the deeper things gradually escape.” At two crucial points, the sound of Francis King beating the ground helps to focus and discipline the narrative One is the death, at the age of 102, of his mother, a woman whose power over her family was asserted through a lifetime's submission to their needs, this event leaves him in a state of anguished incredulity. The other is the loss through AIDS of his lover, David Atkin, whose gallantry under fire, as it were, is evoked without the least hint of maudlin exaggeration.

Both in the innocence of its discursiveness, which assumes that the reader can always make time to linger over what the writer has to say, and in its author's candid self-presentation as something of a punctilious fusspot, this book recalls certain of the more pleasurable literary memoirs of the nineteenth century, books such as Thomas Adolphus Trollope's What I Remember or Cyrus Redding's Fifty Years' Recollections. The genre is fast disappearing, and, in what may be one of its last and most accomplished examples, we should enjoy it while there is still time.