'Nicholas Shakespeare has done everything and known everybody in his time. As a boy in Argentina, he read to Jorge Luis Borges; as a literary editor in London in his early 20s, he published reviews by Dirk Bogarde; as a biographer, he wrote a reliable account of that starry bewilderment of a man Bruce Chatwin; as a novelist, his The Dancer Upstairs was turned into a film directed by John Malkovich.' (Introduction)