Madly Modern Mary overcomes childhood hardships to become the Queen of Shops

In this autobiography, Mary Portas doesn’t dip into the fabled store of her talents by giving an account of her countrywide progress as monarch and oracle of retail, but conjures a nostalgic cornucopia of the mid- 20th-century brands and frankly cheesy TV personalities (she often dressed up as Jimmy Savile) that dazzled her youthful Hertfordshire eyes. These were rapturously set on future journeys, of which we get only one — her great leap forward from North Watford to Knightsbridge, where her undoubted brilliance as a window-dresser eventually blossomed at Harvey Nichols.

While credited with making that store a destination experience — though possibly its acquisition by the Hong Kong magnate Dixon Poon had a bit to do with that — Portas certainly put the cat among the cushions, but it always had a certain cachet. In the late 1950s, Woollands, as it was then, was a Saturday morning pilgrimage for the fashion elite, advertising moguls and photographers, from the established John French and Richard Dormer to the upstarts Bailey, Donovan and Duffy, ooh-ing and ahh-ing at panoramas of hitherto-unseen continental chic.

Mary’s family, the Newtons — Brylcreemed dad, mum with a whisp of Goya’s Coral lipstick, brothers, the altar boy Joe, police cadet-to-be Lawrence, Man-U obsessed Michael, future-nurse sister Tish — were the very model of that long-lost quality, civilised respectability. Mary, though fascinated by less routinely admired Hollywood movie stars like Hedy Lamarr and Carol Lombard and the arrival of glam-rock, was an exemplary student, and moved easily from Watford Comp to classier Rickmansworth Grammar. Intensely observant, every commercial product ratcheted in her mind, and part of the book’s charm (and much of its index — even one bite of a Granny Smith gets a mention) is its litany of fondly remembered brand names.