An entertaining memoir of a life that straddles the old world and the new, temporally and geographically. Born into feudal splendour, he fights three duels and can write, quite without embarrassment, about “our peasants”. Then he marries an American heiress and spends $10 million of her money before she divorces him and he is savaged in the press.

The first third of the book is a sequence of name drops and brief opinions and anecdotes of rich people whom he has met. I found myself wishing he would reveal something of himself, before realising that he was doing so.

The remainder of the book reveals his true purpose. Published in 1924, a year before the verdict in the sixth Vatican trial he instigated to have his ex-marriage annulled, he is trying to justify himself in the eyes of the public.

This memoir is an unintentional study in hypocrisy, vacuousness of soul and an inverted value system that must have poisoned anyone unfortunate enough to be intimate with him. ( )