Sebastian Faulks looks back on youth and lost idealism
I must say, calling a book Fires Which Burned Brightly promises much. At best, from the jaded reviewer’s point of view, an autobiography of delusional self-aggrandisement; at worst, a wild mismatch between the, well, incendiary language of the title and the potentially humdrum contents. It might have been dreamed up by a master satirist intending to inflict maximum damage to the reputation of that noted gentleman of letters, Sebastian Faulks. I once invented a novelist named Julian Sensitive, whose only claim to fame was an autobiographical novel called, after T.S. Eliot’s Prufrock, ‘My Trousers Rolled’. That was a crude joke compared with the hilarity inspired byFaulks’s title. As it turns
