Johnson isn’t, I suspect, the sort of chap who would undertake psychoanalysis. Any hint of childhood unpleasantness (a prep-school headmaster may have been abusive, although not to Johnson) is glossed over: ‘I don’t want to over-egg this’, is typical. A boy crying on his first night at school is described as ‘snivelling’. I would contend, however, that much of this book demonstrates one of Carl Jung’s less batty ideas: that some children find themselves enacting the unlived lives of their parents. Stanley’s mother wrote a memoir about their Devon valley, which was never accepted for publication: her son devotes many pages (perhaps too many) to his own account of life in the same spot. Stanley’s father had a motorcycle, but seems hardly to have used it: his son travelled more than 4,000 miles on one, retracing the journey of Marco Polo. Stanley I Presume is dedicated to the memory of his mother and father, and it is hard not to sense that he has written it for them.

The second half — after he leaves Oxford — is unburdened by this sense that Stanley is trying to be a good boy and please his parents. It’s a better read. The prose becomes freer, more flowing, and there are more jokes. It is impossible to begrudge him the early good fortune which sees him awarded one lucrative scholarship after another; none of which he sticks at, as he freely admits. Impossible, too, not to warm to the man: Stanley Johnson is amusing, unconventional and genial. He never misses an opportunity to remember a kindness; practically everyone who has ever held a door open for him gets a mention. Stanley goes to America, Africa, China, Brussels and Strasbourg. He does important work for conservation and writes 18 books, nine of them fiction. He is clearly a doting father and grandfather and, as he himself might say, a thoroughly good egg.

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