'Just as querulous, misanthropic, greedy, vain and fascinating as ever. One reads, one deplores -- and reads on with vindictive delight' -- Patrick Skene-Caitling, Sunday Telegraph 'The greatest diarist of our times -- funny, feline and disconcertingly honest, wielding a rapier to Alan Clark's cudgel' -- Jeremy Lewis, The Oldie 'His wonderful diaries demonstrates to anyone with eyes to see that he was a superb chronicler of the human condition' -- Hugh Massingberd, Spectator 'Funny, shrewd, waspish and wise ... Lees-Milne was the greatest diarist of this century, and one of its finest writers' -- Jeremy Lewis, Literary Review 20051001 'Nothing short of phenomenal ! surely the finest diary of the 20th Century, truly a great masterpiece of English literature' -- Hugh Massingberd, Country Life 20051013 'Without question one of the finest diarists of the 20th century' -- Selina Hastings, Spectator 20051029

Born in 1953, Michael Bloch read law at St John's College, Cambridge, and was called to the bar by the Inner Temple. He worked for Maitre Suzanne Blum, the Parisian lawyer of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, and wrote six books about the couple. His other subjects include Hitler's foreign minister Ribbentrop, F. M. Alexander (founder of the Alexander Technique) and the politician Jeremy Thorpe. He met James Lees-Milne in 1979, became his literary executor on his death in 1997, has edited the final five volumes of his diary and is currently writing his biography.