There are good jokes – Pyat writes to what he assumes to be Miss Evelyn Waugh, although when met ‘she was permanently dressing as a man and had grown plumply repulsive.’ But the man himself is the very model of a pub bore, the kind of man one is eager to get away from and never see again, and these are Pyat’s memoirs. Apart from the tedious ranting about being ‘the voice and conscience of civilised Europe’, which in one form or another occupies a good many of these pages, almost everything – Pyat’s love affairs, Hollywood career, Russian activities – goes on far too long. Michael Moorcock’s purpose, suppose, was to offer a picaresque view of history in the first half of this century as seen by a man, by no means a hero, shuttled from country to country. It’s a pity he chose a narrator suffering from logorrhea.