Francis King, the brilliant and distinguished novelist, poet, critic, travel-writer and biographer, turns out also to have been a successful Brighton landlady (his own definition), short-order cook and agricultural labourer. These experiences have led to ‘an attitude of profound, if resigned, pessimism about the world. I do not expect people to behave consistently well, and my observation is that few of them do.’ But he has to admit—he could hardly help it—to his own tolerance and compassion.

He is at the same time open-hearted and inexplicable, generous and alarmingly precise. His epigraph is from ‘I Look into my Glass', in which Hardy regrets that he ought to have outlived sensual emotion, but never has.

His father was in the Indian police, and he was brought up as a child of the last days of the Raj. He was sent to Shrewsbury, became a pacifist and did his National Service as a conscientious objector, working on two farms and a commune.

As an Oxford undergraduate, he published his first three novels. On his first visit to Venice in a long vacation, ‘I was seduced (there is no other word for it) by a gondolier’. He joined the British Council, with assignments in Italy, Greece, Egypt, Finland and Japan, and the pattern of his life seemed set. And yet in 1966, when he was 43, he cut short his career and came back to England to support himself as a novelist.

In Kyoto he had been content, and ‘just as I could have opted for an academic career instead of the British Council, and for a domestic life with children and grandchildren, instead of a sexually unorthodox one, so now I could have passed the rest of my years in Japan, instead of at home’. He was haunted, as most of us are, by the path not taken. But he had committed himself to an uncertain, colourful, emotionally adventurous existence, which, however, he was to lead with all the decency, punctuality, sense of family loyalty, orderliness and capacity for hard work to which he has been brought up. This contrast is one of the most attractive features of the book.

Yesterday Came Suddenly, like Francis King's novels, is intensely, almost painfully, true to what his senses record, but also to what other people feel and the curious ways in which they express it. When his father died, for instance, his house-master, ‘a decent, unemotional, inarticulate man', sent for him and in his embarrassment offered him a cigarette from the silver box in the study, then hastily moved it away again.

Anthony Burgess and his first wife ‘would lurch into the room, arms round each other, faces glistening, hair bedraggled, as though, victims of a shipwreck, they had just emerged from a turbulent sea. By the end of the evening both of them were often hardly coherent. Yet there was something extraordinarily touching about their dependence on each other.’

The middle section of the book expands, not into gossip so much as into brief lives, as memory calls back an exceptional number of friends. King has always been attracted to difficult women and hard cases, and the reader has the opportunity to attend Ivy Compton-Burnett's strange nursery tea-parties, to argue with Melina Mercouri (who ‘might have been the captain of a Greek caique bawling out a sailor ordered to wash down the decks’), and sit through an affectionate evening with Somerset Maugham, who ‘looked as though at any moment he might crumble into dust’.

He is too judicious to be taken in—he refuses to accept that either E. M. Forster or L. P. Hartley was ‘a sweet old thing'—although he perhaps thinks Edmund Blunden rather simpler than he was, and does not quite sound the depths of Louis MacNeice's unhappiness. Meanwhile, we can only be grateful to him for sharing these superbly clear and beguiling memories, and possibly for concealing some of them.

Very few autobiographers can have said so little about their own successes. King does mention the Writers’ Action Group, of which he was a cofounder, and which battled for the Public Lending Right, but he says almost nothing about his CBE, or about his Yorkshire Post award for Act of Darkness. His international presidency of PEN is treated—particularly his stand-off with a battered Norman Mailer—in terms of high comedy. ‘The sole real achievement of my Presidency', he says, was the establishment of a PEN centre in the then Soviet Union. He was in severe pain at the time from a recent cancer operation, which was fortunately made better rather than worse by caviare and vodka.

The truth is that Yesterday Came Suddenly has been designed from beginning to end as a story, not so much of a career as of love and friendship. Its true weight falls at the end with the death from Aids of David Atkin, Francis King's lover and companion, in 1988. King, the novelist of separation and loss, ends his book with a description of the pain and guilt of his own bereavement. This must have been a difficult chapter to write. The one compensation is that he never feels happier, he says, than when he is writing, even though ‘it might have been better for me and for those close to me if it had not been so’.